As a former undergraduate and current Ph.D candidate in the computer science department here at Dartmouth, I have a long and happy relationship with BlitzMail. Therefore, the article "College ponders shift from Blitz" (The Dartmouth, Feb. 24) both upset and worried me for a number of reasons. First, I think Professor Luxon showed a few fundamental misunderstandings of what makes Blitz so attractive to the vast majority of the student body. Second, I think that a number of the issues the committee is considering are much more centered around the e-mail needs of the faculty and staff, rather than those of the students.
Professor Luxon said "Incoming '07s were the first group to come to Dartmouth with established [e-mail] accounts reluctant to pick [BlitzMail] up." Where's the evidence for that? Almost everyone I knew when I was a freshman had an e-mail account before college, and that was back in 1998. What makes the '07s so different?
It has been possible to use software other than the BlitzMail client to access your Dartmouth e-mail account for a while now. I know several people who, for various reasons, have done so, and some of them wound up switching over to Blitz anyway. I also don't understand how "greater use of digital photography and electronic address books" have made BlitzMail obsolete. If he's referring to the cap on message sizes imposed by the BlitzMail system, that's on the order of 10 megabytes. Are people really trying to send 20-megabyte files over e-mail? As for address books -- well, it's simple to make Blitz your default e-mail client in both OS X and Windows XP. Then, whenever you click on an e-mail address in your address book, Blitz will pop up a new composing window with that address, ready to go.
The last and most disturbing point was addressed by Hornig in his letter to the editor yesterday (The Dartmouth, Feb. 25). Professor Luxon's assertion that "if BlitzMail were 'jazzed up' like its leading alternatives, it would likely be no faster than other, feature-laden options," shows a fundamental lack of understanding about how Blitz works. As Horning said, there is separate software (called Notify) that "pushes" notices of new mail to users, so their computers can inform them instantly of new messages. That is what enables people to use Blitz like an Instant Messaging client, and that is its greatest and most often used feature (at least among students). To my knowledge, no mainstream third-party client offers anything like this functionality.
Blitz's second-most beloved feature -- that you can log on from any client anywhere and your e-mail environment shows up -- went unmentioned in this article. You go log into any machine anywhere and your address book, your composing defaults, all your messages -- basically everything except your font choices -- follow you. Most other e-mail clients tie you to one machine. Even if you leave your messages on the server, you still have to set up an account on any machine you want to use to check your mail. That means no more public Blitz terminals, unless we all want to use a web-based e-mail client. The lack of attention to this detail, coupled with the fact that it is already possible for users to use whatever client they choose, leads me to believe that this decision is not being considered from the students' point of view. Students, especially undergrads, check Blitz from a variety of different locations every day. Faculty and staff, however, are much more likely to be checking e-mail at the same computer, all day, everyday. They wouldn't notice if their e-mail environment was tied to one machine, because the vast majority of the time, that's all they're using.
This is not to say that I think Blitz is perfect. I totally agree that it could use support for foreign character sets. I share Hornig's reservations regarding HTML e-mail, because flaws in the way some clients handle HTML have caused many of the e-mail-related security vulnerabilities that have clogged up networks across the nation in recent years. Blitz's "deficiency" in this area actually protects users from many e-mail viruses, though it is admittedly annoying to get an e-mail from your friend's hotmail account and see no text, just an attachment labeled "HTML 1." Perhaps a happy medium should be sought through the kind of real discussion of Blitz's pros and cons that Hornig called for.
So, while I will admit some flaws, I can comfortably say that I love Blitz. I've used it happily for almost six years now, and hope to keep using it even after I graduate ... again. Reading this article made me worry very much that the College will stop supporting it, especially since the head of the subcommittee that is deciding its fate seems to understand neither what makes Blitz so well-loved by students nor even how Blitz works in the first place. Professor Cooley's comments at the end of the article gave me a little solace, as it seems that at least some members of the committee more fully realize the issues at stake here. Since it's already possible for users who need the missing features to use any client they choose to access their Dartmouth e-mail account, I don't see why it's necessary to force us all away from Blitz. If keeping Blitz alive costs too much, maybe we should consider putting it up on eBay next to the swim team.
