Webex Mail Client V1.0

[mman...@umiami.ir.miami.edu]

I would like to announce the Webex Mail Client for use on the WWW. Webex is a
collection of perl scripts that gather and format your mail for reading on
the web. Webex can be downloaded at:

ftp://ftp.cs.miami.edu/pub/www/webex/webex_current.tar.gz

Here's the first couple of paragraphs from the README file.

Webex v1.0 -- by Matt Mankins (mman...@mail.arc.miami.edu)

--Webex is a collection of programs designed to gather electronic mail.

So what, I have Pine.

--Here's the difference: Webex uses your favorite WWW client as its end-user interface.

Cool.

--Yeah. So now you can embed hypertext in your email messages.

Formatting is nice. Images too?

--Yep. Everything an HTML file can do. With Webex we are throwing away the
antiquated notion that we must *send* messages as we do in the physical world.
Now, instead of clogging up the spool files of your 100 closest friends with all 72
fully digitized images of your vactation to Bora Bora, you can let them *request*
information as they see fit. Yet I digress...

Hmm. Well, what else is there? I can see you smiling, eager to show your new toy.

--Well, since you asked. It does folders. Looks in your home directory for the
"mail" directory where all the folder files are kept. You have full folder
management functions: save, delete, create, read. You want more, don't you?

Well...

--Ok. Here's a cool one. It uses Raph Levien's <ra...@cs.berkeley.edu> Premail as a
go-between between the client and sendmail.

So?

--You obviously are oblivious to the best mail related program since they did away
with the Pony Express. It does anonymous remailing, PGP encryption, aliases, and
all kinds of nice trickery. The current version of Webex, however, only supports
anonymous remailing. Later versions will do the complete encryption.

Hey, but then what about security.

--As with any networked environment security is an issue. In this initial release,
it may be more of an issue. All your username/password data is in plain text,
encoded in the form data. This means that net browsers, such as Netscape, which
cache data will likely store this data somewhere on your local machine. I
recommend clearing both the memory and disk caches after using Webex. This will
help, but other interprocess communication is open for sniffers and the like. No
password/user information is stored on any remote machine. The next version will
focus on encryption--sending and receiving PGP mail, interprocess encryption, form
encryption, the whole gamut.

Did you just say gamut?

--Yes.

I bet it's really expensive.

--Nope. Free, with a capital F, underline the ree.

So what do I need to make it work?

--Well, aside from the compressed tar file, you need to have at least Perl 3
installed on your system. If you want to let all the users on a machine read
their mail you need to have root access. So far it runs on UNIX machines only.

--So, do you want to know how to install?

Well, first, digame: Can I read my mail if I'm not on a machine that is also
used as a HTTP server?

--Yes.

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Matt Mankins