I was pleased to get the PingER update from the University of Trieste [1] - it was the first time I had heard from PingER since 2002, when it was presented at the eJDS Open Round Table on "Developing Country Access to On-Line Scientific Publishing: Sustainable Alternatives" [2]. I was there talking about (and hoping to breathe life into) the www4mail tool [3], and am pleased my www4mail presentation (PPT) [4]
is still up on their website! www4mail was developed at the University
of Trieste and for a time there were a few really good servers running
including ours at Kabissa and another at Bellanet in Canada. These servers played a critical role for a time, enabling people with limited access to the web to request web pages to be sent to them by
email.
We shut down our own www4mail service in 2004 [5], and the www4mail tool itself and the www4mail.org website seems to no longer be supported as of January 2008. This makes sense - it was a great tool for a long time and essential for many people around the world to get access to any online information. But now, while access to the internet is still not readily available for most of our members in Africa, our experience has been that they tend to use web interfaces when they DO get online,whether at cybercafes or in their place of work. Please correct me if your experience is different, but they typically do not use offline email programs [6] like Thunderbird or Outlook to download mail to work on offline. The practical problem then becomes one of having a reliable, quick and user-friendly webmail and a means to print out documents, email messages or web pages or save them on a USB flash drive [7] to work on later.