TY - JOUR AU - McMurdo, George AB - Electronic mail is generally thought of as a means of communicating and interacting with other people, either one-to-one or one-to-few, by personal e-mail, or else by participation in electronic discussion groups. However, electronic mail can also be used as an interface to a quite comprehensive range of Internet information retrieval util ities, where the communication is with machines rather than people. Tools and services accessible by e-mail include: searching and retrieval from Bitnet e-mail list archives; archie searches of files available at anonymous FTP (file-transfer protocol) sites; file retrieval from anony mous FTP sites; browsing of menus and retrieval from gopher menus; 'veronica' index searches of gopher infor mation; retrieval of World Wide Web information; searching and retrieval from WAIS (wide-area information server) information sources; reading and contribution to Usenet newsgroups; directory services, such as 'whois' and 'finger', for locating people and their e-mail addresses. TI - Mailing to the machine JF - Journal of Information Science DO - 10.1177/016555159502100307 DA - 1995-06-01 UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/sage/mailing-to-the-machine-bv0x6qwKFv SP - 217 EP - 227 VL - 21 IS - 3 DP - DeepDyve ER -