Project originated at
The Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics, Trieste, Italy
and running since August 1998.
http://www.ictp.trieste.it/~www4mail
www4mail offers an equal opportunity to Navigate and Search the whole Internet via E-mail to anyone, anywhere and at any time free of charge.www4mail is an example where information technology can bring benefits to individuals and communities world-wide.
Benefits
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.
To: www4mail@wm.ictp.trieste.it |
http://www.ictp.trieste.it ... |
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.
Free software
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.
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.
How it Started
www4mail project evolved from the Abdus Salam ICTP's goal of providing researchers in developing countries access to databases, on-line journals, and scientific preprints repositories. For all this, a Web-to-email tool was needed that could handle state-of-the-art Web resources and accommodate queries and other information transactions between the user and the on-line resource. www4mail meets this need, and aims at lowering the barrier for access to Web information by users in developing countries.
Innovation
Earlier, freely available versions of Web-to-email software such as Agora and GetWeb were more cumbersome for users, in that they did not allow to activate further requests to the server from within a Web page received. There were many constraints related to support for dynamic content such as Forms, JavaScript and cookies. The use of frames caused numerous problems, and the number of file types was quite limited.
www4mail was designed to overcome most of these obstacles and to replicate, as closely as possible, the experience of browsing the Web via a full Internet connection including the search of on-line databases. It is very easy to use.
www4mail has also broken new ground in flexibility for the Web-to-email
service provider offering comprehensive management facilities such as:
All of these features can be enabled or disabled as desired by the service
provider.
The future
An evolving goal of the project is to disseminate the service more widely, and to use it as a catalyst to build capacity in developing countries to set up and host local www4mail services.
As the Web becomes an ever more sophisticated and complex environment, with dynamic content, multimedia elements, secure servers, xml, MathML, etc. the www4mail project need access to state-of-the-art knowledge of the technologies involved.
Contributions for further developments are welcome! Contact e-mail: canessae@ictp.trieste.it June 2000/2001 |