Kabissa's www4mail server now permanently offline

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logo_www4mail.gifFor many years Kabissa offered access to web
pages for e-mail only users through our 'www4mail' server. It was much
appreciated by many in the Internet community, and received thousands
of requests a week. We enjoyed providing the service and have made many
new friends around the world as a result, including www4mail's
developers at the University of Trieste, Clement Onime and Enrique
Canessa, and users of the service in Cuba and other Internet-remote
places. We even received e-mail once from a person working on an oil
platform in the ocean who was somehow able to use Kabissa's www4mail
server to access information on the web. This service has been discontinued as of March 25, 2004.

We decided to take our www4mail server offline permanently for two
important reasons. The first is that the African civil society
organizations we serve were not making much use of it, despite www4mail
being very well promoted throughout the years on our Website and in the
weekly Pambazuka News e-mail newsletter. We believe this is due to the
fact that many organizations that are able to use the Internet do have
web access, even if the amount of time they can spend online is
limited. We are therefore focussing our efforts on helping
organizations to make better use of the web access they do have,
through our hosting services and training program. The other reason is
that the Kabissa server has become more busy due to our increasing
membership and the popularity of big mailing lists we host, in
particular Pambazuka News, and we could no longer spare the server
resources that were being taken up by people requesting large files
(sometimes people requested whole linux distributions through Kabissa).

It was a great ride, and we are disappointed that it has come to an
end. We look forward to seeing other www4mail servers coming up to fill
the gap, and are always a willing partner on new innovative tools that
will also help to make the Internet more useful for people in
low-bandwidth parts of the world. I'd be glad to hear from others also
working towards this goal, and also answer any questions about the
Kabissa experience with www4mail.

Below are some notes and further reading for those interested in this topic.

1) www4mail is an open source, freely distributable perl program that
runs on linux machines. For more information and to get a copy, go to http://www.www4mail.org . There is also a mailing list people can join that might want to get involved in developing www4mail:

http://www.dgroups.org/groups/w4m

2) Other www4mail servers remain active, including:

www4mail@www4mail.org

3) There's a www4mail "powered" portal called VITA-Connect that we
developed with funding from infoDev but which was never
implemented - the platform is freely distributable open source
available to anyone who wants to check it out. Write to us for details.

4) Some more reading on the subject of www4mail:

www4mail: A Bit of Web-For-Email History (By Enrique Canessa, Clement Onime)

http://www.informit.com/articles/article.asp?p=24400

Email: A viable alternative to the web? (By Tobias Eigen)

http://ictupdate.cta.int/index.php/article/view/183

PowerPoint presentations from Bellanet, Kabissa and the University of
Trieste from the "Open Round Table on Developing Country Access to
On-Line Scientific Publishing: Sustainable Alternatives"

http://www.ictp.trieste.it/~ejds/seminars2002/program.html