Rediff Archive

India-based Rediff has announced the launch of a new service this week named "web-in-mail". Rediff positions the service as perfect for those who have their Internet web browsing blocked in some way (e.g. corporate, education, spouse, etc.).

What you do is send an email to Rediff with the desired webpage in the subject. You can also use commands to search Google and Rediff as well. Rediff says the webpage will be emailed to you in moments although in my testing some pages took several minutes and some never came. Those that did arrive did so without a stylesheet which means one LONG column of text. If all you want is to read the stories and don’t mind scrolling past all of the navigation, web-in-mail might work very well.

One interesting note about how the service works. In the email you receive with the webpage, all of the links are changed so that if you click on any of them, a new email is started which will also be sent to Rediff to grab the linked page. Pretty interesting!

While this new service clearly needs some work in timing and style, it is a pretty nifty idea. Now they need to add a scheduler function and the ability to send html-formatted rich emails.