ICTP's e-mail information network does more than just deliver mail. For many researchers in the South, it's their pathway to information on the world wide web.

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The information revolution has not only brought scientists closer together on a global scale; in the minds of some critics, it has created a 'digital divide'--a gnawing gap between scientists in the North, who enjoy full e-connectivity, and their colleagues in the South, who do not.
ICTP's "www4mail" project, which Centre staffer Clement Onime and I launched in 1998, has sought to close this troublesome divide by providing researchers in developing countries with access to databases, online journals, and scientific preprint repositories via e-mail.
Simply put, www4mail gives browsers in the South the means to navigate the internet off-line and free-of-charge through low-cost technologies that are available in their home countries. As a result, www4mail offers an instructive example of a technological solution to disparities in 'information access' between the North and South. It also aims to help fulfil ICTP's mandate for transferring knowledge to developing countries.
An important lesson learned from www4mail is that high-bandwidth access to the internet is not essential for bridging the digital divide. Indeed the service--and the software that drives it--offers web information to internet users in countries where full connectivity is not widespread. As an added bonus, www4mail's support for non-Western character sets enables internet users from these countries to interact with web-based information in their own languages.
Since its launch more than two years ago, the software has evolved rapidly thanks largely to extensive user feedback that has led to enhancements and new features. www4mail was designed to overcome many of the obstacles--such as JavaScript, cookies and frames--that have sometimes impeded the use of other free software. At the same time, it has tried to replicate, as closely as possible, the experience of browsing the web via full internet connection, including searches of online databases.
Most importantly, the software is easy to use and extremely reliable. So much so that the www4mail project was named a finalist in the Stockholm Challenge Award 2000, a 'cyberspace competition' that included more than 600 projects from 84 countries (see News from ICTP, Summer 2000, p. 14).
An evolving goal of the project is to disseminate the service more widely and to use it as a catalyst to build capacity in developing countries for setting up and hosting local www4mail services. Until now, five main public www4mail servers--one each in Germany, Italy and the United States and and two in Canada--have been established to deliver web pages via e-mail to users around the world. Each server can supply more than 5,000 pages of information daily. We hope to have additional servers in place in the near future.
www4mail's value is reflected largely in its rising number of users. But like the dynamic environment in which it operates, the project's prospects for success in the future (and the not-so-distant future at that) lie in its ability to meet the demands of an ever-more sophisticated and complex operating environment. That, in turn, means finding ways to provide easy access to more dynamic content, multimedia elements, and specialised software.
To keep pace, the www4mail project must continually draw on state-of-the-art knowledge and technologies. For this reason, observations and insights from www4mail users are always welcome. It's the only way we can ensure that we stay abreast of advances in the field in ways that allow us to serve the needs of scientists working in remote areas. By taking one small step at a time, projects like www4mail will help determine whether, over time, the digital divide narrows into a sliver of separation ultimately bridged by creative applications of today's technology.

Questions concerning www4mail may be addressed to canessae@ictp.trieste.it. For a first-hand look at the project, see http://www.ictp.it/~www4mail.

Enrique Canessa
ICTP Consultant, Scientific Computing Section

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