Experience in implementing an e-mail/web gateway

This paper describes our experience in implementing an e-mail/web gateway. The system permits a user to send one or more large documents via e-mail, and at the same time overcomes problems that the receiver may encounter when downloading large size files with e-mail agents. The user sends a document as an attachment to the destination address, on fly the e-mail server extracts and saves the attachments in a web-server disk file and substitutes them with a new message part that includes the URL pointing to the saved document. The receiver can download these large objects by means of a user-friendly browser. This integration between electronic mail and web services is useful for people such as library operators who need to send large files to Internet users and it can be customized in order to satisfy the needs of different organizations.