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.
Swarthmore’s email program, SquirrelMail, is well-named for the Swarthmore campus but it isn’t beloved for its speed or reliability. Many students use it simply because it sits on the portal page. A third of the Swarthmore student body, 496 students, have chosen to forward their emails to alternative email services. The favorite is overwhelmingly to Google’s mail service, GMail, used by 477 of the students. SCCS, Yahoo, and AOL round out the list.
Swarthmore’s staff aren’t nearly so picky about their email access however. Only 40 faculty or staff forward, with “about half of those to public email services,” said Glenn Stauffer, the Associate Director of Enterprise Systems at ITS.