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W3Gate: E-Mail Access to the Internet
Frequently asked questions about Q: How does W3Gate work? A: W3Gate offers people with an email-only access to the internet access to the World-Wide Web. W3gate is a programme that starts when an email arrives for w3mail@gmd.de. It reads the email and looks for W3Gate-commands in the message. Then it processes the commands. That means W3Gate fetches the Web-Pages on behalf of the email-sender and sends the Web-Page via email back to the sender. A typical W3Gate-command looks as follows: get http://www.w3.org/ or get -img http://www.w3.org/ In general W3Gate scans the first lines of a message for commands. The commands can be included into an BEGIN ... END statement. This can be useful if your email-system generates additional message-lines or if you are using MIME-attachments. Then you avoid getting error-messages from W3Gate. example: BEGIN get -img http://www.gmd.de/ END It is important that BEGIN ... END is either in upper case or in lower case. Don't mix it up. In the first example the Welcome-Page of the W3-Consortium is fetched from its Web-Server and an email is generated that contains the HTML-file. In the second example the HTML-file is fetched, too, but the images that are embedded in the HTML-file are added as MIME attachments. As result the sender receives a MIME-email (multipart/mixed) that contains all files in separate body parts. Q: Which other command-line options can I use?A: there exist several options you can combine. Only the option -c columns can just be used in combination with -u, -a and -t. -t this options strips the HTML-tags from the HTML-file. The result is a plain text file that can be read easily. -u with this option you can URLs into the plain text. W3Gate includes relative URLs pointing to documents on the same Web-server and complete URLs that point to documents on different Web-Servers in general. -a this option behaves like the -u option but it completes the relative URLs. The command get -a http://www.w3.org/ produces a plain text containing URLs from the HTML-file in brackets. relative links pointing to documents on the same Web-server are completed to full URLs. e.g. <a href="./Consortium/Legal/ipr-notice.html#Legal Disclaimer"> is embedded
in the plain text as follows: -c columns limits the number of characters per line to columns characters. It is only possible to use this option with the options -t or -u or -a or with a combination of those. -ps this option converts an ASCII-file into a postscript file. -l this option gets the HTML-file and also all files pointed to by URLs within the HTML-file. With this option you can get the interesting Web-page and simultaneously all Web-Pages and objects that are referenced from this file. -s size Web-Pages can become very large. With this option you can limit the size of each mail you receive from W3Gate to size K. This is useful when your provider offers a limited message-size. If the file is larger than size K the file is distributed over several mails that contain a sequence number in the subject field. To get the original file you must join all email-bodies together according to the sequence number. -uu if you want a file to be uuencoded before W3Gate you must
use this option. In general W3Gate looks at the MIME-type of each file and
encodes all files other than text with base64. This is necessary to get
e.g. image-files or programme-files that contain 8-bit data through
mail-gateways -gz this option compresses a file with gzip and reduces the file-size strongly. It is recommended for large text-files. Q: Which kind of files can I fetch with W3Gate?A: W3Gate gets files that are accessible by the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP1.0), the File Transfer Protocol (FTP) and by GOPHER. Q: Can I use BITFTP commands with W3Gate?A: No you can't. But you can map the BITFTP-commands like cd , get , etc into URLs. E.g. If you want to get the file computersongs-1.4.Z as user anonymous from the GMD FTP-archive via BITFTP you would write: FTP ftp.gmd.de NETDATA W3Gate accepts the following command: get ftp://ftp.gmd.de/misc/computersongs-1.4.Z When You want to fetch multiple files from the same FTP-Server just add a new command-line to the mail W3Gate will then contact again this server and get the file. Currently W3Gate only scans the first 10 lines of your emails. Q: Why do I get a zipped file with wild characters when I retrieve it with W3Gate?A: Many mailers don't deliver 8-bit files (zip-files, exe-files, JPEG, GIF, ...) correctly, as they only support delivery for 7-bit files (ASCII). Therefore a transfer-encoding is necessary. W3Gate offers an option to uuencode the file you ordered explicitly. In order to uuencode a file you have to place the command option -uu between the get and the URL. Nevertheless W3Gate looks at the MIME-type of the file and uuencodes it automatically if it isn't text. If you don't know exactly which MIME-type a files has it is safest to add the -uu option on the command-line. Q: How can i reassemble a file that is distributed over several mails?A: Some files are too large to be deliverered conveniently with one email. Imagine someone would send you the next release of Netscapes or Microsofts Web-browser per email. Probably your mailbox would be exhausted and the delivery itself would be also a problem. When W3Gate mails a part of a file it generates a sequence number which is placed in the Subject-line of the email. To reassemble the original file you must copy the email-bodies of each email to a new file and remove all mailheaders in an editor. Q: Why do I only get 50 emails with a size of 100 K each when I wrote for a 6 MB file?A: W3Gate has a limit of 5 MB for each command. This limit is very high for an email-based service. In most cases this is absolutely enough as HTML-files are often about some kilobytes. If you want to get larger files look for an separate FTP-connection which is appropriate for this. Q: Is it possible to redirect the output from W3Gate to another email-address than the originators email-address?A: Although it might pe practical we decided to disable this feature because of the potential security risk. It would be too easy to fill someone else mailbox. Q: Can I start queries to search engines with W3Gate?A: Yes you can. You must provide the search strings in the URL. W3Gate just passes the URL to the search-engine (e.g. www.altavista.digital.com). Each search engine has a slightly different command-syntax. Therefore there exist FAQs explaining the structure of these URLs . There are three FAQs on W3Gate's web-server: http://w3gate.gmd.de/WSALTA.FAQ In general the search engine returns many Web-pages with links to matching
Web-pages.
A simple W3Gate command only returns the first page.
If you want the contents of the links from the first page add -l to the
command-line. Q: Sometimes W3Gate only returns an error message from the server. What can I do?A: First check if the URL is correct. If the error message contains a status code 404 the URL was wrong. If the Web-Server tries to set a cookie W3Gate is unable to accept the cookie. It may be a problem to get files from those servers. Q: W3Gate always complains about "missing keword get" although I wrote an correct W3Gate-command into the mail?A: Probably your mail-client generates MIME-mails with a body-part (text/plain or something like that. W3Gate doesn't recognize commands within MIME body-parts. To work with W3Gate you must send plain messages to it. Q: How many commands does W3Gate accept in one mail?W3Gate only reads the first 10 lines of the email and looks for W3Gate-commands. If each command fits into one line these are 10 W3Gate-commands. Q: The URL I want to fetch with W3Gate is longer than 80 characters. Can I
break it over several lines? example: get http://www.altavista.digital.com/cgi-bin/query?pg=aq&what=web\ Q: Does W3Gate support Tables and Frames?A: Currently not. W3Gate supports HTML2.0 and therefore tables can't be converted into plain text. If you want to see a Web-Page with tables download the HTML-Source (without using -t, -a or -u) via W3Gate and open the file with a browser. If you want to fetch a Web-Page based on Frames you have to fetch the Top-Page containing the frameset and copy the URLs of the other frame-pages to a new mail to W3Gate. Q: Which other mail-gateways to WWW/FTP/News Server exist?A: There exist several other mail-gateways to the World-Wide Web. Some offer access to WWW, some to news and others are specialized to FTP-Servers. The most popular different from w3mail is Agora/Getweb that allows access to the World Wide Web. agora@dann.affrc.go.jp - last modified 21-Jan-98 - References: |
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