HTTP2mail Gateway

- What is HTTP2mail?
- How does it works?
- How can HTTP2mail help me?
- What makes it different from full Internet connection Web browsing?
- What are the system's requirements?
- Getting ready to setup
- Setting up HTTP2mail software
- Configuring the web browser
- Testing the installation
- How can I select my favorite web robot?
- How can I manage the content of the cache?
- What to do if I change my MAPI account login name and password?
- And what if I change my e-mail address?
- HTTP2mail current limitations
- Where to ask for technical support?

What is HTTP2mail?

HTTP2mail is a freely distributable Windows 95/NT freeware program that lets you use a standard Web browser to navigate the Web throughout an e-mail - only access to the Internet.

How it works?

HTTP2mail lies between your browser and your e-mail client software. It captures the Web requests sent by the browser, formats them in a web-mail understandable format, and uses your e-mail client to send the request. Then, it monitors your inbox looking for web-mail responses and retrieves and stores them on a cache. It serves dynamic pages that allow you to manage the cached content.

How HTTP2mail can help you?

Do you have e-mail – only access to the Internet? HTTP2mail will enable you to use any standard web browser to navigate the Web in a way similar to the way you use a full Internet connection to browse the Web.

Are you an experienced web-by-mail cybernaut? Then you will be interested in the possibilities HTTP2mail gives you:

- receive fully formatted web pages directly into a Web browser
- access the embedded hyperlinks without the need to copy and paste the desired URLs into your e-mail client software
- select the appropriate web-mail server address and send the request.

Do you frequently use web search engines by mail? Then you will not definitively experience the tedious and error prone manual process of creating URL-encoded requests anymore.

What makes it different from full Internet connection Web browsing?

Time. HTTP2mail uses an off-line service (e-mail) to handle a service normally carried out on-line (Web). That is why once you fulfilled a request that had not been previously cached, HTTP2mail answers you with a notification refering that your request have been sent to the web-mail server. Then, you should poll the HTTP2mail cache waiting for the answer from the web-mail server. Responses from web-mail servers can take hours.

What are the system's requirements?

You should have:

- Windows 95/NT 4.0 or later, operating systems.
- TCP/IP protocol stack installed (If you have an Internet – mail account, you should have it installed).
- A MAPI-compliant e-mail client software.
- A proxy-enabled Web browser.
- About 7 Mbytes hard disk space for setup.

Getting ready to setup

The setup files are packed in a zip file. You should decompress them.

Setting up HTTP2mail software

Run the setup.exe utility. It will launch you into a wizard-like setup environment. Follow the instructions.

When finished it, run the HTTPmail.exe program.

Configuring the web browser

- Configure your favorite web browser to access the Internet throughout a proxy server.
- Set the proxy server Internet address to the same IP address or network name of your computer.
- Set the proxy port to 8080 (default HTTP2mail setting).
- Disable the viewing of images or other type of binary data on your Web browser. The current version doesn’t support the visualization of retrieved images.

Testing the installation

Send the following request from your Web browser:

http://localserver/about.h2m

If you properly configured your software, you will receive the About HTTP2mail page. We recommend you to add this hyperlink to your "favorite sites" list in your Web browser.

Next, from the About HTTP2mail page, click the hyperlink New Pages available on the top of the page. This hyperlink will bring you a list of the pages available at the cache that had not been visited yet. If you have been patient enough, and strictly followed our indications, there should not have been any available pages, that is why we preloaded such an example of a newly available page. We strongly recommend you to add this hyperlink to your list of favorite Web addresses. You will visit this page frequently. Each time you click this hyperlink, HTTP2mail will take a look into your Inbox, retrieve and delete all the responses coming from the web - mail server, caching them into a database. Then, HTTP2mail sends you a list of the cached pages that have never been visited, with hyperlinks that allows you visit the page, delete it from the cache, or refresh it by sending a new request to the web-mail server.

Now you are able to start browsing the Internet. Try some hyperlinks. You can easily start by clicking some hyperlinks from the preloaded page.

How can I select my favorite web robot?

HTTP2mail comes configured by default to work with agora web mail robot. You can select a different web mail robot, or introduce a new one, by using the HTTP2mail Properties page. In this case:
-right-click your mouse over the icon of the HTTP2mail running application.
-open the Properties... menu. It will show you the Server Options dialog.
-select the Routers Properties tab.

Now you can:
Select a different router (web-mail robot)
  Select one router from the Name combo box.
  Check the Active check box.
Delete an existing router:
  Select one router from the Name combo box.
  Click the Delete button. (Active routers can't be deleted)
Add a new router:
  Click the Add button. It will present you the AddRouter dialog.
  Supply a 10 characters name to the new router.
  Select one of the three web robot types that HTTP2mail can manage (agora, getweb or w3mail).
  Supply the e-mail address to which send the web-mail robot commands.
  Supply the e-mail address from which the web-mail robot answers. Normally it is the same addres that the above, but in some cases it can be different (for example, the w3mail web robot at w3mail@gmd.de answers the commands from the address w3mail@enigma.gex.gmd.de). This address is basic for HTTP2mail to identify the web-mail responses in your InBox.
  Click Ok button to create the new router.

And how can I manage the content of the cache?

Current version of HTTP2mail does not allow setting any automatic rule for deleting or refreshing the cached content. You should do that by yourself, with the help of the Browse Cache page.

The Browse Cache page

HTTP2mail serves you this page as a response to the following request:

http://localserver/browse.h2m

The Browse Cache page presents you a list of all the cached content, and a form to filter the list according with your needs.

The list of the cached content provides you with information about the request's status, the request's Universal Resource Locator (URL), the page's title, if it's available, statistics about the processing of the request, and hyperlinks to delete or refresh the request.

Request Status

There are three possible statuses for the request:

- Available (displayed in green): Indicates that there is available content for the request. You can reach it by clicking the hyperlink at the URL.
- Requested (displayed in yellow): Indicates that the request for the specified URL was sent to the web-mail server, but there is not any response available yet. Check the statistics for the date the request was made.
- Pending (displayed in red): Indicates that the request for the specified URL was not sent yet to the web-mail server.

Universal Resource Locator (URL)

It is the URL of the requests. If the status is available, you can click the hyperlink to visit the page.

Page's title

It is the title of the cached page (if the status of the request is available, and HTTP2mail could recognize a valid title for the page).

Statistics

They are a set of statistics about the processing of the request, and the hits the page had received.

Sent: date when the request was sent to the web-mail server.

Received: date when the request was cached from your Inbox to the database.

Last Served: date of the last time you visited this URL

Hits: Total count of the number of visits that have received this URL

"Delete" hyperlink

Click this hyperlink if you want to remove this URL from the cache.

"Refresh" hyperlink

Click this hyperlink if you want to refresh the cached content of this URL. Actually it sends the request to the web-mail server again.

The Browse Cache page form

In the Browse Cache page is a Search form that allows you filter the list of the cache content according to your needs. It contains the following fields:

URL

Place here the fragment of the URL you are looking for. Surround it with ‘*’ wildcards at the beginning and at the end of the URL fragment. Currently it is not allowed to include slashes (/) on this field.

Containing

Place here the phrase you are looking for inside the pages. This search is very highly "dumb". It will look just for the HTML source code, embedded tags included.

Status

Select the status of the pages you want to get. For more information on status, look at Request Status

Requested, Received, Last served

This fields allow you to filter the cache list by the time the requests where sent to web-mail server, the answer from the web-mail server was received, and the last time the page was visited. Fill the needed fields with date and time values formatted according to the Regional Settings in your Control Panel.

Total of responses

This allows you to filter the cache list by the number of responses (hits) you had received from any cached page.

Order by

Use this radio buttons to order the list of cached content by URL, status, the date when the request was sent, received or last served, or the total of responses, in either ascending or descending order.

Submit

Click this button to send the customized request.

What to do if I change my MAPI account login name and password?

HTTP2mail currently asks you your login name and password each time it starts, so if you change it, just supply the correct information.

And what if I change my e-mail address?

Nothing should happen. You can continue to use HTTP2mail.

HTTP2mail current limitations

Current version of HTTP2mail has the following main limitations:

- It is unable to visualize retrieved images or content type other than HTML.

We are currently working on this. Stay tuned for new versions of the software.

Where to ask for technical support?

There are users of the HTTP2mail specially looking for questions about the program submitted to HELP-NET and ACCMAIL mailing lists. You can post your questions to these lists. Announcements related to HTTP2mail are also posted to these lists. HELP-NET is a general-purpose mailing list, dedicated to general questions about the Internet usage. ACCMAIL is specifically dedicated to access the Internet by e-mail. You can subscribe to HELP-NET by sending the body "subscribe HELP-NET" to the following address: LISTSERV@LISTSERV.TEMPLE.EDU. To subscribe to ACCMAIL, send the body "subscribe ACCMAIL" to LISTSERV@LISTSERV.AOL.COM. Leave the subject empty in both cases. If you regularly use HTTP2mail, you are encouraged to join this self-technical-servicing effort.