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