Free WWW4mail Service

The service was established in May 14th, 2002, celebrating the NBS first anniversary. It was established on the NBS server space at sdf.lonestar.org (an USA NGO providing shell accounts to Unix Servers). The service is not currently operational. Efforts will be made to re-start it.

Rationale:

This service could address the issue of access to information (among others) to the people in Africa with only very limited bandwidth that they practically rely only on e-mail.

For persons with e-mail access only, like many Nile Basin countries, it is possible to obtain documents on the Web using one of a number of mail servers set up for this purpose. You send a command by e-mail, such as "get" or "send" followed by the URL of the Web page you want. The server then retrieves the file from its location, and sends it to you by return e-mail. This should in turn give you URLs of other linked pages, which you can request next. The process is slow compared to Web "browsing," and response times may vary significantly depending on your location and network traffic. Nevertheless these services, which in effect do your browsing for you, are now being used regularly.[i]

Benefits:

[ii] www4mail enables people to access the whole World Wide Web via e-mail free of charge.

www4mail allows, for example, researchers in developing countries -where full access to the Internet is often unavailable, slow or extremely expensive- to access on-line databases and other Web based information resources they need to carry out advanced research.

Challenge

www4mail is an instructive example of a technological solution that directly addresses the disparity in access to information. An important lesson learnt from www4mail is that high-bandwidth access to the Internet is not essential in order to bridge the "digital divide".

The www4mail service, and the software behind it, provides equal access to the wealth of Web information to Internet users in countries where full connectivity is not widespread. It also serves users in well connected countries who cannot afford full access to the Internet that includes unlimited Web browsing.

In addition, www4mail's support for non-western character sets enables Internet users from these countries to access Web-based information via e-mail in their own languages. In addition, it helps blind Internet users surf the Web.

In all likelihood, the demand for Web-to-email technologies will follow the expansion of the Internet.

Example e-mail:

To: www4mail@nilebasin.com
Cc:
Subject:

TSOURCE http://nile.ca

TSOURCE here instructs the server to send the HTML code, so as the page can be viewed offline by the Internet browser. Sending the URL without the TSOURCE will send the page as a text attachment. To learn more about the capabilities of the www4mail server, send an e-mail with the word “Help” in the body of the message. You will receive a detailed description of commands.

Free service:

Up to now, three main public www4mail servers (in Italy and Canada) have been established to deliver Web pages via e-mail to users around the world. Each server can deliver more than 5,000 pages of information per day to the many users. All three servers are currently operating at full capacity. Other servers are being implemented.

www4mail is an open source application, that allows you to navigate off-line and search the whole Internet via electronic mail (e-mail) by using any standard Web browser and a MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Exchange) aware e-mail program. E-mail messages sent to www4mail servers get automatically passed to your e-mail agent when you select (one or more) buttons that link to other Web documents within a requested Web page. There are many options available for user quota statistics, e-mail uuencoding reply, etc.

www4mail, among other things:

delivers most types of Web documents (with a variety of HTML tags, (java)scripts, cookies and metatags; handles dynamical contents, frames, etc).
Parses HTML (text) and source HTML.
Preserves the original layout of the requested Web pages.
Retrieves information from FTP sites, USENET news servers: (i.e., ftp://site/path/file and gopher://site/path/file).
Supports Web Forms (GET or POST) to conduct Web database searches. (When posting it is also possible to have a URL containing a ? sign).
Sends replies as e-mail attachments, or in the body of an e-mail message depending on the type of request (options) sent by the e-mail client through the Web browser.
Handles MetaTags. That is, if a web page is re-directed or re-located by the use of a META statement, www4mail automatically warn you about the possible re-location of the information and provided suitable links for the new location at the top of the reply page.
Handles FRAMES. When a requested document contains frames, www4mail inserts suitable links to each framed document.
Supports user authentication for password-protected Web/FTP sites.
Error messages such as password & username required are trapped by www4mail and sent back to the user.
Web pages that are entirely dynamic (i.e., created on-the-fly) are also supported. But the page content varies with different browsers.
Provides support for text only access for compatibility with the alternative "Agora" and "GetWeb" Web-Mail servers.
Serves filtered requests to reduce bandwidth. Transfer of binary data is also supported.
Supports MIME, the Internet standard for representing multipart and multimedia data in e-mail.
Support uuencode as an alternative to MIME.
Allows to retrieve PostScript and PDF versions of HTML pages.
Allows to retrieve HTML documents having links for pictures or images.
Allows to retrieve multi-lingual versions of HTML pages, where available.
Allows encrypted https transactions.

Other www4mail servers:

www4mail@wm.ictp.trieste.it, The Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP), Trieste, Italy.
www4mail@unganisha.idrc.ca, Unganisha - International Development Research Centre, Ottawa, Canada. (starting date: 07/Oct/1998)
www4mail@web.bellanet.org, Bellanet - Supporting Development Collaboration, Ottawa, Canada. (starting date: 19/Jan/1999 - statistics)
www4mail@ftp.uni-stuttgart.de, The University of Stuttgart ftp-server, Germany. (starting date: 21/Feb/2000)
www4mail@kabissa.org, Kabissa - Space for Change in Africa, UK (starting date: 14/May/2000)
www4mail@collaborium.org, The Science & Technology (S&T) Collaborium, USA (starting date: 30/May/2000 - statistics)
boix@ernestoperez.com, Official Boix's www4mail free service (starting date: 16 May 2002)

Free software

The www4mail code is being developed and mantained by Clement Onime in collaboration with Enrique Canessa and the support of The Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics, Trieste, Italy. The Scientific Computer Section of the ICTP is acknowledged.

www4mail software is licensed under the GNU Public License or GPL. The GPL is used by thousands of programmers who want to give others the right to copy and modify the source code of their programs.

www4mail is very low cost to establish as a server (i.e. use of PC 486 or faster computer and an Internet connection with reasonable bandwidth).

The software has evolved very rapidly through extensive user feedback since 1998 resulting in many www4mail enhancements and new features. The resulting software product is extremely reliable.

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[i] Africa Policy Information Center (1996): Africa on the Internet: Starting Points for Policy Information. A background paper published July, 1996; last updated August 14, 1996. http://www.africaaction.org/bp/inet3.html

[ii] For more information please visit the http://www4mail.org/ and download the users’ manual http://www4mail.org/manual/index.html