Another OT Question - HTTP Mail Service

[Steve Campbell]

Mr. Kossen,

I am definitely leaving your reply, as written, in this message. It is very
informative and well worth repeating.

Thank you and others for the time.

Steve Campbell
campbell at cnpapers.com
Charleston Newspapers

> 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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