BlitzMail was an e-mail system used at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, United States. It was one of the earliest e-mail server/client packages. Use of BlitzMail ended in 2011, in favor of a Microsoft suite of email/online collaboration programs. History BlitzMail was developed by Dartmouth in 1987 and went live in the summer of 1988. The name BlitzMail started as a joke among its programmers, as it had to be developed quickly. In 1991, when Dartmouth required every student to own a computer, the server code was updated to allow multiple servers to accommodate the heavy demand for the system. In 1993, the server was rewritten to support mail folders. In 1994, the client and server software was released for use outside of Dartmouth. Some non-Dartmouth BlitzMail deployments include Valley.Net, an internet service provider in New England's Upper Valley region and, from 1991 to 2005, Reed College in Portland, Oregon. The first versions of the client ran only on the Apple Macintosh operating system. The client was ported to Windows around the time of Windows 3.1. Dartmouth's Computing Services rolled out an updated BlitzMail client for Mac OS X that featured encrypted client-server communications. Developed in May 2006 by computer science doctoral candidate Chris Masone, the software became available in late 2007. Version 2.9 for Mac OS X 10.3 was available beginning in October 2008. Recent releases of the client have experimental support for rendering (but not composing) HTML-based messages. A project at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center continued to use the Windows BlitzMail service, which was no longer being developed or supported. Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center BlitzMail servers were scheduled to be deactivated on October 1, 2012. A Microsoft suite developed by email/online program collaborators was released to fill in its role. Dartmouth College BlitzMail became the primary means of communication of all types on the Dartmouth College campus, between students, professors, and administrators. Hundreds of public terminals were located around campus, in libraries, dining halls, and academic buildings. In the mid-1990s, Mac Classic public terminals were commonly referred to as "Blitzcheckers." Additionally, "blitz" became used as a noun and verb, used the same way "email" might be. While BlitzMail is no longer used, students as of 2020 still use "blitz" instead of "email." Until the mid-2000s, largely due to poor cellular reception on campus, many students opted to use BlitzMail rather than cellular phones, but this trend decreased as service