Mailing to the machine

Abstract

Electronic mail is generally thought of as a means of communicating and interacting with other people, either one-to-one or one-to-few, by personal e-mail, or else by participation in electronic discussion groups. However, electronic mail can also be used as an interface to a quite comprehensive range of Internet information retrieval util ities, where the communication is with machines rather than people. Tools and services accessible by e-mail include: searching and retrieval from Bitnet e-mail list archives; archie searches of files available at anonymous FTP (file-transfer protocol) sites; file retrieval from anony mous FTP sites; browsing of menus and retrieval from gopher menus; 'veronica' index searches of gopher infor mation; retrieval of World Wide Web information; searching and retrieval from WAIS (wide-area information server) information sources; reading and contribution to Usenet newsgroups; directory services, such as 'whois' and 'finger', for locating people and their e-mail addresses.