I'm not sure if anyone's particularly interested, but whilst engaged in a little bit of digital archaeology this week I stumled across two email
gateway scripts from the mid 1990s. They allow one to request files off of
FTP servers via email. They were a hugely important way of accessing the
'net back in the day, for people whose sole access was often email (through work, school, or a BBS, say).

I have no idea what work would be required to get them running today, and
can't even begin to speculate what vulnerabilities they might contain. Both
are written in Perl, with one claiming to require "Perl 4.0 patchlevel 35 or later". One is from 1997, the other from 1993(!).

http://ftp.ist.utl.pt/pub/ftp/utilities/mail-gateways/

I just figured some folks might find them an interesting diversion, a neat forgotten relic of the (really) slow Internet era.


--

Inanities: gopher://tilde.town:70/1/~lkosov/ (with netmail address & GPG key) He/him/them/they/whatever. If in doubt, assume the above post contains sarcasm --- Synchronet 3.18b-Linux NewsLink 1.113

In '98 I was in a far corner of the world and we had no connections like
we're used to, but we had mail via POP. And there was a WWW gateway. I've looked for it, or reference to it. But I looked using the word proxy
rather than gateway. It was hosted in Japan. Anyone recall?

lkosov <lkosov@tilde.town> wrote:

I'm not sure if anyone's particularly interested, but whilst engaged in a little bit of digital archaeology this week I stumled across two email gateway scripts from the mid 1990s. They allow one to request files off of FTP servers via email. They were a hugely important way of accessing the
'net back in the day, for people whose sole access was often email (through work, school, or a BBS, say).

I have no idea what work would be required to get them running today, and can't even begin to speculate what vulnerabilities they might contain. Both are written in Perl, with one claiming to require "Perl 4.0 patchlevel 35 or later". One is from 1997, the other from 1993(!).

http://ftp.ist.utl.pt/pub/ftp/utilities/mail-gateways/

I just figured some folks might find them an interesting diversion, a neat forgotten relic of the (really) slow Internet era.

--- Synchronet 3.18b-Linux NewsLink 1.113

J. Random User <whir@tilde.club> wrote:

In '98 I was in a far corner of the world and we had no connections like we're used to, but we had mail via POP. And there was a WWW gateway. I've looked for it, or reference to it. But I looked using the word proxy
rather than gateway. It was hosted in Japan. Anyone recall?

There were a bunch, though I don't recall that specific one. www4mail was popular, but I'm not sure if it was around in '98 or not. There used to be a website, but, tragically, you appear to have had to email the developers for the sources. :/

An older one was called "Agora", which is unfortunately hard to Google.

http://nocensor.freerk.com/bypass/email.html

A ca. 1997 version of Agora survives here:

https://web.archive.org/web/19970730175222/http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/Agora/Agora.tar.gz

(Apologies for comically long URL.)

Agora has a Wiki article which notes a lot of apparent shortcomings. Caveat emptor, and all that.

Another similar program mentioned in the wiki is w3gate.

--
Inanities: gopher://tilde.town:70/1/~lkosov/ (with netmail address & GPG key) He/him/them/they/whatever. If in doubt, assume the above post contains sarcasm --- Synchronet 3.18b-Linux NewsLink 1.113

On 2020-08-19, lkosov <lkosov@tilde.town> wrote:

I'm not sure if anyone's particularly interested, but whilst engaged in a little bit of digital archaeology this week I stumled across two email gateway scripts from the mid 1990s. They allow one to request files off of FTP servers via email. They were a hugely important way of accessing the
'net back in the day, for people whose sole access was often email (through work, school, or a BBS, say).

Wow! What a relic!

I have no idea what work would be required to get them running today, and can't even begin to speculate what vulnerabilities they might contain. Both are written in Perl, with one claiming to require "Perl 4.0 patchlevel 35 or later". One is from 1997, the other from 1993(!).

The lovely thing about Perl is the great respect for backward compatibility,
so chances are this stuff would still work.

I give a casual observation to the scripts, and they use 'require' and 'local' more than what I would, but given how old they are, it was probably the
regular thing back then.

It would be definitely interesting to set it up and play around it :D
--- Synchronet 3.18b-Linux NewsLink 1.113

it was agora!

thanks

lkosov <lkosov@tilde.town> wrote:

J. Random User <whir@tilde.club> wrote:

In '98 I was in a far corner of the world and we had no connections like
we're used to, but we had mail via POP. And there was a WWW gateway. I've
looked for it, or reference to it. But I looked using the word proxy
rather than gateway. It was hosted in Japan. Anyone recall?

There were a bunch, though I don't recall that specific one. www4mail was popular, but I'm not sure if it was around in '98 or not. There used to be a website, but, tragically, you appear to have had to email the developers for the sources. :/

An older one was called "Agora", which is unfortunately hard to Google.

http://nocensor.freerk.com/bypass/email.html

A ca. 1997 version of Agora survives here:

https://web.archive.org/web/19970730175222/http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/Agora/Agora.tar.gz

(Apologies for comically long URL.)

Agora has a Wiki article which notes a lot of apparent shortcomings. Caveat emptor, and all that.

Another similar program mentioned in the wiki is w3gate.

--- Synchronet 3.18b-Linux NewsLink 1.113

J. Random User <whir@tilde.club> wrote:

it was agora!

Yay, always nice when a mystery gets solved. :)



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Inanities: gopher://tilde.town:70/1/~lkosov/ (with netmail address & GPG key) He/him/them/they/whatever. If in doubt, assume the above post contains sarcasm --- Synchronet 3.18b-Linux NewsLink 1.113

lkosov <lkosov@tilde.town> wrote:

I'm not sure if anyone's particularly interested, but whilst engaged in a little bit of digital archaeology this week I stumled across two email gateway scripts from the mid 1990s. They allow one to request files off of FTP servers via email. They were a hugely important way of accessing the
'net back in the day, for people whose sole access was often email (through work, school, or a BBS, say).

This was very much normal back in 90-х. So called "ftpmail" servers.
I used them alot - ftpmail@cris.net, ftpmail@krid.com, etc.
What's funny the entire list of ftp servers was available in usenet.
The list was not too long.
--- Synchronet 3.19a-Linux NewsLink 1.113