From: utzoo!decvax!harpo!npois!eiss!eisx!ggw Newsgroups: net.general Title: Automatic access to archives Article-I.D.: eisx.155 Posted: Fri Jun 4 16:39:24 1982 Received: Sat Jun 5 04:13:27 1982 FROM: G. G. Woodbury Subject:Public archive access There is a lot of information living out there in netland that would be nice to have archived in a public (UNIX) access location that could be gotten automatically. I would like to propose a method for such access. The basic method would be automatic answering of fixed-format messages to a special mail recipient on specified machines. For example: To: npois!harpo!whoever!request Subject: get archive Request: item-id This message for instance, would retrieve the item given by item-id and return it to the originator. The subject field contents is the specification of the action desired, in this example to get an item from an archive. The item-id field could specify the archive (if there is more than one on a specific machine). Any machine could set up an archive on any given topic and then publish (via netnews - of course) the contents, or there could be acommand available. The syntax of the commands would be very simple, and rigidly enforced. Any bad requests received could be bounced back with a simple comment about syntax. To extend to concept of automatic mail requesting, an opinion polling recipient could be implemented with ease. That is if someone can provide a nice set of routines that could read mail and handle request parsing. Does anybody have such things already? Am I months behind? Am I years ahead? Comments? Gregory G. Woodbury BTL PY 2K-332 x7287 (...!npois!eiss!ggw)