www4mail- Web for Mail

ICTP - The Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics, Trieste, Italy

Web Navigation & Database Search by E-Mail
(The Next Generation)

USERs Manual: [ HTML ] [ PostScript ] [ PDF ]

www4mail: [ Program Source ] [ Guide to Offering www4mail ]
[ Discussion List ] [ Project Highlights ]

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. A few of these are described in the Users Manual.

Updated Information and help on the www4mail service can be retrieved by sending an e-mail

              To:  www4mail@wm.ictp.trieste.it
         Subject:          (... whatever you like)

and writing in the body of the message: help

You can also use any of the strings listed beside.

 help cookies    help denials
 help end        help errors
 help forms      help get
 help getpart    help getps
 help getpdf     help getsize
 help quota      help send
 help source     help split
 help tsource    help xbase
 help xbyjs      help xbypass
 help xcharset   help xclearcookies
 help xdelayjob  help xdeletejob
 help xdocinfo   help xdisablecookies
 help xform      help xextraopt
 help xget       help xformreply 
 help ximage     help xjsdump
 help xloadimg   help xlanguage 
 help xloadurl   help xmime
 help xmylang    help xmultimime
 help xmyquota   help xnoautozip
 help xnoframe   help xnocookies
 help xnostat    help xnoscript
 help xsource    help xseparate 
 help xurlcode   help xsubmit_now
 help xusepost   help xsubmit_on
 help xuseqp     help xuudeview
 help xuuencode

www4mail:

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.

... and much more ...

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