~ Accmail techniques ~
         Petit image    Accmail
Version June 2000

[Introduction]    [Gerald E. Boyd's lores]
~ Accmail techniques ~
[accmail searching]    [filedownloads]    [URL retrievals]
[Other toys to play with]       [Usenet via accmail (Sonador)]
Introduction

still in fieri, will be completed as soon as I find the time :-)
You should visit and head Master Gerry Boyd's [site] and maillists, Gerry being (together with the now 'retired' Bob Appleton of the '4u series') the foremost authority on the web for all accmailing 'purposes'. I owe them a lot of knowledge.
A small "trick" you should be aware of, is that when you write a long url address (which happens pretty off when you accmail), you may have some problems to keep it on the same line without cutting it (the bot on the other end would not understand a cutted url). In case you wish to write a very long URL - especially useful when addressing CGI scripts with parameters, remember that all lines that end with a backslash - (\) are considered to be continued on the next line - and be aware that the next character of the line is the first character of the next. This means that: 
http://www.search\
 lores.org
   is interpreted as
   

http://www.search lores.org
so don't put leading spaces on your continued lines unless you really want them there.
Gerald E. Boyd's lores

still in fieri, will be completed as soon as I find the time :-)
  1. To get the ACCMAIL FAQ: Send an e-mail to "[email protected]" and enter only the following line in the BODY of your posting:
    send usenet/news.answers/internet-services/access-via-email
  2. To receive Boyd's tut on cracking search engines by email:
    ftp.netcom.com/pub/gb/gboyd/wscrack.faq
  3. To access directly Boyd's site go here: [http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/1236/]
Accmail techniques: searching

Of course most accmail searching techniques applies to URL retrieving as well
You should by all means try Google by e-mail.
Send the following message:

TO: [email protected]
SUBJECT: [whatever, useful for your own loggings]
BODY: get http://www.google.com/search?q=search+hints&num=100&sa=Google+Search

Replace search and hints with subjects of your own choice.
Another good (and usually faster) service is KFS:
TO: [email protected]
SUBJECT: [whatever, useful for your own loggings]
BODY: search search and hints

Replace search and hints with subjects of your own choice.

Gerry Boyd's own advices follow below (his example was for a yahoo search about spam, but I have modified it :-)
Gerry prefers to leave the Subject field blank (or write "request" into it), but I think that if you will use a meaningful subject line, you will better evaluate your results, especially if you perform multiple queries at the same time:

To: [email protected] (OR other Agora server)
Subject: [whatever, useful for your own loggings]
Body of message: SEND http://ink.yahoo.com/bin/query?p=%22professional+searchers%22

To: [email protected]
Subject: [whatever, useful for your own loggings]
Body of message: URL: http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=%22relevance+ranking%22

To: [email protected]
Subject: [whatever, useful for your own loggings]
Body of message: DUMP http://ink.yahoo.com/bin/query?p=%22results+clustering%22&hc=0&hs=0
(very interesting findings!)

To: [email protected]
Subject: [whatever, useful for your own loggings]
Body of message: SEND http://ink.yahoo.com/bin/query?p=%22topic+categorization%22

To: [email protected] (OR other www4mail server)
Subject:[whatever, useful for your own loggings]
Body of message: SEND http://ink.yahoo.com/bin/query?p=%22filtering+and+routing%22

A slightly more complicated procedure: healthnet (very quick):

To: [email protected] (OR other Getweb server)
Subject: [whatever, useful for your own loggings]
Body of message: GET http://www.yahoo.com/

Wait for returned healthnet form, fill out form and return to same Getweb server. You can also do the same thing at a www4mail server by using the same commands shown for the Getweb servers.
Note: [email protected] doesn't reply to .net or .com addresses.



Accmail techniques: filedownloads

still in fieri, will be completed as soon as I find the time :-)

Email [email protected] with the word help both in your subject and in your body fields. Subscribe. Use it once suscribed (with your own password). Max 10 Megabytes downloads.

Email [email protected] with the word help both in your subject and in your body fields. Subscribe. Use it.
Classical commands:

Accmail techniques: URL retrievals

see [above] the section about accmail searching techniques, since they can be used for URL retrievals as well, here I'll delve a little into grabpage specifics

Make sure you address requests for web pages to: [email protected] other addresses at GrabPage will not return a web page to you. This is tricky: the "Reply-To" address that gets sent when you retrieve a web page is not '[email protected]', but the info address - which wont work when replaying.
To retrieve a web page, put the url of the page you want, after the four characters URL: either on the subject line or in the body of your e-mail. So, if you want to retrieve this very page your Subject: line should look something like this:
Subject: URL: http://www.searchlores.org/accmail.htm
or the body of your e-mail would look like this:
URL: http://www.searchlores.org/accmail.htm

You can format the webpage that gets sent back to you, putting the following two commands in the body of the e-mail message: 
Length: 3500
Width: 40
this will cause the page to be formatted as best we can at 40 characters wide, and sent back in multiple messages of no more than 3500 characters (this would leave room for any header that your mail service may add to the message, yet would still keep you under a 4K "limit").

Note that you can also FINGER per email :-)

To find out someone else's e-mail address - if their site supports remote fingering, put WHOIS: followed by the name of the person in the Subject: line, so it'll look something like this: 
Subject: WHOIS: [email protected]
To have the page sent back to an HTML- enabled mail reader, like Netscape Messenger, include the directive HTML: in the body of the e-mail message. This will allow you to view the page as a web page within your mail reader instead of a text message. This request would look something like this: 
URL: http://www.searchlores.org/accmail.htm
HTML:
Note that this will ONLY work if your mailer is HTML-enabled.
To minimize congestion, GrabPage will not process requests for potentially huge downloads such such a zipped, or pdf files.



Other toys to play with

still in fieri, will be completed as soon as I find the time :-)

Other toys to play with, email them with the word help both in your subject and in your body fields, and play accordingly:
Usenet via accmail (Sonador)

Visit the [usenet] section of this site if you need more info about usenet searching techniques.
To use the "Sonador" system, simply send an email to [email protected] with "help" both in the subject and in the text fields. The Sonador Automated Usenet Service allows you to read and post to Usenet newsgroups through email. This service is perfect for people who are limited to email usage, such as Juno customers and corporate slaves, or for people who just don't have time to sift through Usenet with a news reader. The concept is simple: Your favorite groups are searched for keywords, and any matching articles are emailed to you. Keyword searches are accomplished using Perl regular expression pattern matching. Keywords are ORed against message bodies and headers. The news server is polled once each day, at around 02:00 Eastern Standard time. More than 22000 newsgroups are supported.
Petit image

(c) 2000: [fravia+], all rights reserved