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.
Over the past week ITS has switched their mail software, a change which has resulted in dramatically increased Swatmail speed.
The biggest change made was upgrading the IMAP software, which affects how the majority of students check their mail. The new software stores mail much more efficiently than the previous software, and will handle large mailboxes with improved speed. Although the switch has not been finished yet, “we’re already seeing an order of magnitude increase in overall system performance,” said ITS system administrator Sean Finney.
There have been a few minor problems during the switch thus far, involving external mail clients Eudora and Apple Mail, but these have been taken care off. “The switch went relatively well,” said Finney, “given that two months ago we thought we were going to have to take the mail server completely offline for 2 days to do what we did.”
Due to the switch, some students may have noticed emails stating “DO NOT DELETE” in their mailboxes; these are simply left over messages from the previous IMAP software and may be deleted.
Finally, ITS is still working on the return of Horde, the HTML-based replacement for Swatmail. “I’m not sure that we’re going to re-implement it this semester,” said Finney, “but we’ll definitely have something in place by the beginning of next semester.”
