Hragir
Yet Another Free E-mail via WWW

WWW is an excellent place to reinvent the wheel; almost everybody on the net does it, repeatedly recreating services already widely distributed and actively used, without fear to lose the money invested into developement.

Hragir (which means 'written by fire' in Armenian) is yet another Web-based e-mail service quite similar to the many already existing ones. It was written because

• I needed something fast and reliable enough to communicate with some of my friends;
• phone lines in Yerevan aren't suitable for phone calls;
• Internet ('Extranet') in Armenia is too slow to use something like Hotmail or Yahoo e-mail;
• obtaining a 'real' e-mail address from one of local providers would cost money for my friends, and nobody wants to pay money for something that can be done for free;
• I couldn't find sources of anything similar to the program I needed on the Net.

So, I wrote it. I wrote it in Perl with extensive use of various modules from CPAN (I also maintain a CPAN mirror here in Armenia); it works under Solaris 2.5.1 now and should be easily portable into any other Unix-like environment; one can try to port it to NT, I won't.

Basically, with Hragir you can obtain your separate e-mail address, send and receive messages, forward your message to another e-mail address; there is also a couple of other useful (or useless) features. Try it here, and if it appears to be to slow to use, it's mostly because of the bandwidth and it's because we need it here and let others use their Hotmail there.

Look&Feel

I'm trying to keep it simple. I'm not sure that I'm successful in it.

Basically, a user can send and receive messages, install forwarding to another address, request a confirmation; recently a limited support for folders (i.e. for bringing some order to one's mailbox) has been added. The folders, however, are organized in somewhat unusual way: all messages are listed on the screen, but the list can be split into several parts; this was done in attempt to force user to delete old or unneeded messages rather than to take the space on my filesystem.

Messages are automatically decoded from base64 or quoted-printable, but no support for multi-part MIME exists by now, as well as there is no possibility to upload and send binary files via this interface. It is possible to implement almost everything, but these features condradict with my desire to keep the service strictly oriented to it's main purpose, i.e. fast and reliable communication facility.

As usual, the engine tries to guess and make a link from everything that in fact represents one, i.e. URLs and e-mail addresses, but flattens all html tags in the text of the message, thus if you want to send a page, send a URL of it.

There is much to be added, there is definitely something worth to be removed, and the user interface can be made much more commercially looking (by the way, there is a version 'with candles', which is even less commercially looking, although I used to like it).

The current status of the project and it's future are indefinite. You are free to ask.

David Tolpin,
lost in Armenia