Retrieval of documents through mail
This document is intended
to be retrieved through mail, and may look funny with a normal W3 browser.
To get it through mail, just send a mail to agora@agora.w3.org with
the body
WWW
Welcome to the World Wide Web!
To retrieve a document, you just have to specify its "address",
called a "Uniform Resource Locator" (URL). For example, the URL of
this document
is http://www.w3.org/hypertext/WWW/Agora/Help.html.
This means that to get it, you just have to send a mail to
agora@agora.w3.org, with whatever subject you like, the body of
the mail being:
SEND http://www.w3.org/hypertext/WWW/Agora/Help.html
If this is the first time you enter this new medium, we suggest you
look at the following documents:
- http://www.w3.org/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html
- The World-Wide Web Initiative
- http://www.stars.com/
- World-Wide Web Development
- http://sunsite.unc.edu/boutell/faq/www_faq.html
- World-Wide Web Frequently Asked Questions
In this new media, most documents are hypertext. In such a case you
will notice numbers in square brackets such as [12] next to some
special words. This means you may access a new document, hopefully
related to the word(s) preceding the [12]. If you are interested to
see this new document, you will find at the bottom of the document
containing the [12] a list of URLs, next to numbers. Then, just copy
the URL next to [12], and paste it
to the body of a mail you send to agora@agora.w3.org .
If you are lazy, there is another way to retrieve W3 documents
through email: just reply to agora@agora.w3.org , and specify
in the body the number(s) you are interested in. This program
will figure out which document you are interested in by looking
at the subject header that you then have to preserve.
Example 1
You'd like to know more about the World-Wide Web Initiative ? All
right, the number between brackets is 1. Let's look at the bottom of
this page. 1 corresponds
to http://www.w3.org/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html .
So you have to send a mail to agora@agora.w3.org with the body:
SEND http://www.w3.org/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html
Example 2
You still have some questions on World-Wide Web ? All right, the
appropriate documents are "World-Wide Web Developpment" and
"Frequently Asked Questions". They have the numbers
2 and 3 in brackets next to them. So you reply to the mail from
agora@agora.w3.org that you are currently reading, and write in
the body:
2 3
Note: If your mail tool truncates subject lines, it may be useful
for you to know that this robot needs only the part (URL: ...) to
determine what the numbers refer to.
Commands related to the retrieval of W3 documents
Everything appearing in [] below is optional; everything
appearing in <> is mandatory; all arguments are case insensitive.
Only the first 10 lines of requests will be processed.
- send <URL>
www <URL>
-
this will send you back the document you requested, with all
its hrefs, so that you may ask further requests.
(if the document is too large, you will get only its first 5 000
lines). The url sent may contain the following characters:
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzABCDEFGHIJK
LMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ0123456789:/._-+@%*()?$#&
Example:
SEND http://www.w3.org/
WWW http://www.stars.com/
- rsend <return-path> <URL>
-
Same as "send", but you can specify a different return-path
Example:
rsend zorro@horsemen.holywood.com http://www.w3.org/
- deep <URL>
-
same as "send", but it will also send you the documents refered to
in the URL you mentioned.
(If the documents are too large, you will get only the first 5 000
lines of what "deep" should provide). Note that this service
may be disabled by the Agora administrators.
Example:
deep http://www.w3.org/
- source <URL>
-
Same as "send", but allows you to see the source of the document,
so that you may use a nicer HTML browser to read it
Example:
source http://www.w3.org/
- rsource <return-path> <URL>
-
Same as "source", but you can specify a different return-path
Example:
rssource zorro@horsemen.holywood.com http://www.w3.org/
- help
-
The documentation you would then retrieve describes the way to
subscribe to some www-related mailing-lists.
Enjoy!
Arthur Secret (agora-request@agora.w3.org)
Agora, for those who cannot be in the Arena
Created 1994
Last updated 23 June 1995