Somewhere in 1996/1997, I had a free E-mail adress at Digitale Metropool
Antwerpen (the city Antwerp/Belgium). I also had web access to
http://www.dma.be/, but not complete internet access. So, I was not
able to surf the internet.
Luckily, there were www2email robots on the internet. So, I could browse
the internet by sending an email to such a robot and receive the webpage by
email.
There was also a great mailing list (accmail)
where people could ask questions about accessing the internet by E-mail.
2009 - 2014:
I have an ADSL connection to the internet. I don't need www2email robots
anymore. But there are still people who have limited access to the internet.
However, nowadays there are not very much www2email servers anymore.
That's why, as an hobbyist who enjoy playing with GNU/Linux after
a hard day at work, I started experimenting with my own www2email server somewhere
in 2009. This www2email server was running on my normal PC (Debian GNU/Linux).
Somewhere in 2012, I saw an item on techsnap about
a nice little computer that could be used as a firewall with pfsense.
[ 28m20s - 30m40s
]
So, I've ordered 2 of them. On one I have installed pfsense.
On the other one, I have installed Voyage Linux
and moved my www2email software (which is just some ugly hacked together
BASH script) to it.
Below, a picture of the little computer that was serving webpages by E-mail
at that time:
2014 - 2020:
Because it was cumbersome to keep my ALIX 2D13 www-2-email server up to
date, in december 2014, I moved my www-2-email server to a VPS at Digital Ocean
2020:
Due to abuse I've shutdown my www2email server. It was fun. I hope people
enjoyed this www2email server.