XPost: comp.bbs.misc, comp.software-eng   
      
   I'm sure that nobody reading this forum would use these facilities   
   which I use here in degenerating S.Africa to reduce my telco costs.   
      
   Webmail: the ability to fetch [preferably in text form - lynx-like],   
   html, via email.    A Bob Rankin, now deceased, used to promote and   
   post the status of the various servers who offered this service [free]   
   mostly for the 3rd world.   
      
   Since these are run by bigish organisations : NGOs or universities   
   we see the remarkable inertia.   Ie. they just leave the broken   
   software running for ever. I've found [annoying] work arounds, but   
   I suspect the many would-be users haven't. Eg;   
      
   1. getweb@usa.healthnet.org   
     returns URLs with 2 "." when the "." wraps to a new line   
      
   2. webgate@vancouver-webpages.com   
     often decodes  the web-page to base64 and sends the whole lot,   
    instead of sending just the text [lynx-like] and if the size is too big   
     it notifies "too big" without showing the URL so that the user can   
     make other arrangements. This is like bouncing email, without   
     notifying which email bounced !   
     And if it's a lo-tech solution, for the 3rd world users why send   
     all the eye-candy crap plus the extra load of base64 encoding ?   
      
   3. agora@dna.affrc.go.jp   
    for some unknown reason decodes every N'th ascii char thus:   
   "'s" -> "$BCT(B"   
   "'t" -> "$BCU(B"   
   "n" -> "$BEO(B"   
   "p" -> "$BEQ(B"   
   ... etc ??!   
      
   Wow, I think I've just spotted the 'translation algorithm'.   
   It's not just random.   
      
   Is it normal in the 'industry' for such broken software to be just left   
   running ?   
      
   == Chris Glur.   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)