Another OT Question - HTTP Mail Service

[Willem Kossen]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Steve Campbell" <campbell at CNPAPERS.COM>
To: <MAILSCANNER at jiscmail.ac.uk>
Sent: Friday, 09 July, 2004 3:29 AM
Subject: Re: [MAILSCANNER] Another OT Question - HTTP Mail Service


> David and Ugo, and all others who may offer input,
>
> Pop and Imap are enough for me to manage, but there are some users here
who
> think that anything new is better. I was not familiar with this option and
only
> wanted information on what this stuff was. Heck, I'm still learning
SendMail.
> You all have given me that information. Thanks a lot for the time and
effort.
>
> I will relay this on to that user. She thinks email
management/administration
> means to just add users to a list and it's done. She also thinks Outlook
and OE
> are the greatest, so .....
>
> I hope this contributes if others are asked this same question later.
Sorry for
> the OT, but you gotta know, this is the most informative list on the
Internet,
> and I for one have learned so much about so much. Thanks all.
>
> Steve Campbell

just a general reaction to this thread:
http-mail is just a non-standard way of circumventing firewalls by using the
usually allowed http protocol to transfer mail information. This is not a
standardised way of communicating between clients and servers at all. There
are a number of products that can 'proxy' between the normal imap/pop/smtp
protocols and http-webmail serverbackends. there are products (free) lik
mrpostman, fetchyahoo, hotmail popper and many others that will allow for
translation of httppages from webmailsites into pop/smtp. If necessary you
can use those.
outlook can do the same directly with hotmail and if other webmail providers
write 'plugin' libraries it can also work with others. The libraries should
take care of the translation of http information in 'mail'information.

just note that:
1. http has a lot of overhead compared to pop/smtp
2. http for mail is NOT a standard, it's specific to the vendor using the
http backend like yahoo/ms/mail.com/ etc.
3. for free webbased accounts like hotmail and yahoo etc. there is no pop
smtp options so you need to either directly connect using http or proxy
using one of the applications that will do this for you

I hope to have given some general information on this that can be usefull
for others, if i raised more questions than i answered, sorry........

One thing: i don't like http mail for another reason: it's not so easy to
check mail for viruses and other malicious or annoying stuff if http is
used. you may want to ban this sort of stuff inside companies completely.
there are virusscanning plugins for proxies like squid, but especially if
https is used, they are useless. httpmail-remailers like fetchyahoo can
forward httpmail to a normal smtpserver which allows scanning by mailscanner
which is good. Otherwise there is a definate NEED for an onaccess
virusscanner on desktops, especially Windows ones......

Regards

Willem Kossen

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