How to Retrieve Documents Using Just E-mail

There are many people who have e-mail but don't have full Internet access, which means they can't use FTP, Gopher, World Wide Web (WWW) and other "surfboards" of the Net to cruise around, see what's out there, and retrieve it if interested. This is especially true for people in the NIS.

However, all is not lost. There is a way, using simple e-mail, to go where you want and retrieve files, too.

URL stands for Uniform Resource Locator and almost every document on the Internet has one. A URL is essentially a document's Internet address. If you know a document's URL, you can retrieve that document by just sending an e-mail message. The format is simple:

Send a message with the words:

send URL (replace "URL" for the URL of the document you want, many start "http ...")

[email protected]

An example: In the last issue of NetTalk we profiled a list of funding sources for NIS projects. It is located at the Friends and Partners World Wide Web site we use, and we included the file's URL. In order to retrieve the file, you would send the following message:

Date: Thur, 10 Nov 1994
To: [email protected]
Subject:

--------------------Message Text----------------------

send http://solar.rtd.utk.edu/friends/funding/world.learning.funding.html

• If your e-mail software has a "Subject" line, you should leave it blank.

• Capitalization matters when typing a URL. Unlike e-mail addresses which can be typed in either upper or lower case letters, a URL must be typed absolutely correctly or the program can't find the document.

• The message should be on one line and there can't be any blank spaces in the URL. Sometimes URLs are very long. If this is the case, just keep typing and let your e-mail program break the URL on to a second line. Don't insert a carriage (or hard) return.

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Center for Civil Society International [email protected]