improved on campus. In 2006, students began checking blitz on their cell phones. Client The BlitzMail client was graphical, and ran on Windows and Macintosh computers. Several Java implementations exist, as well as web-based clients, such as NetBlitz and WebBlitz. The client has not had major updates since the late 1990s, with the exception of a port to Mac OS X. The client does not officially support HTML-based e-mail, dealing only in plaintext. (HTML files are viewed as attachments.) There is unofficial support to allow HTML-based email to be opened within the client normally. The program is portable for users. A user's mailbox, address book, and preferences are all stored on the server. Any user can log into any installation of the client and have full access to their data. After a user logs out, no data or personalization is stored on the local machine. This feature allows the use of the many public terminals. BlitzMail also acted as a pseudo-instant messaging client. Messages were processed by the server and delivered to the recipient almost immediately. The program was integrated with the Dartmouth Name Directory (DND), allowing users to message any recipient with a Dartmouth email address by searching for their name. Technical specifications BlitzMail speaks its own protocol between client and server, meaning that only the BlitzMail client can utilize the full feature-set of the server. Messages entering and leaving the BlitzMail domain are handled via Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP). , patches were available that allowed clients to connect to a BlitzMail server via POP3 and IMAP (with SSL.) The client communicates to the server on TCP ports 2151 and 1119 and the notification service runs on UDP port 2154. In 2002, SpamAssassin functionality was added to BlitzMail. The DND server was also modified to allow LDAP lookups. The BlitzMail and DND servers run on DEC Unix and many Linux flavors. The OS must support POSIX threading or Mach kernel-style cthreads. The server will run on systems with very low hardware requirements. The BlitzMail servers have run on a variety of hardware at Dartmouth. In the early 1990s, the mail and DND servers ran on 25 MHz NeXT cubes named after Santa Claus' reindeer. At the time, hundreds of sessions could be handled on each machine. Later, the servers were migrated to DEC 3000 AXP Model 300s. A Python library implementation called PyBlitz was released in 2006 by