College updates Swatmail web interface

Editor’s note: This article was initially published in The Daily Gazette, Swarthmore’s online, daily newspaper founded in Fall 1996. As of Fall 2018, the DG has merged with The Phoenix. See the about page to read more about the DG.

Students and faculty who attempt to login to Swatmail from the Portal Page may notice that Swatmail seems to have received a bit of a makeover. This makeover is actually the replacement of an old webmail program, TWIG, with a new system, known as IMP. The new interface came online at the end of this summer, under the direction of Fran Gelfand of ITS. Users may currently access both the old and new interfaces; come September 20th, however, the http://swatmail.swarthmore.edu web address will take users to IMP. At the end of the semester TWIG will be taken offline, according to Gelfand.

The new system greets users with a sleeker blue interface instead of the old red header. According to an email from ITS, the new system includes many “noble enhancements,” not the least of which is encryption of usernames and passwords. IMP also features greater support for world languages with different characters and filtering and searching of messages.

During the early weeks of school, the new system has not been the campus default, although interested users were invited to use it when it became functional. Since then, ITS staff has been working on “customizations to the interface and changes to default configuration settings” to make IMP as easy as possible to use.

According to Gelfand, over 1500 members of the Swarthmore College community with swarthmore.edu email accounts have used the new system on at least one occasion.