Online Journalism Blog

There are a number of services that allow you to receive web pages by e-mail. These include Web2Mail; PageGetter.com; and WebToMail

All you do is send an email to the address used by the service with the URL of the web page you want in the subject line. After a few minutes (they say) you receive the web page in HTML format in your email.

How is this useful? I can think of a number of ways:

• Firstly, if you are on the move and cannot access the web but can access email (or, for instance, the webpage is proving difficult to access on a mobile browser), this provides a useful workaround – like sending a text message when you can’t get a reliable enough signal for a phonecall.
• Likewise, if you discover a useful webpage on the move but are unable to bookmark it, you could email the address from your phone and pick it up later (if old media tactics like ‘note to self’ don’t work for you anymore)
• In fact, you could set up that email address to forward emails to a service like Posterous, so you auto-blog those webpages.
• Back at the PC or laptop, this is a useful way to set up a mailing to keep you updated on sites that don’t have email newsletters, particularly those that don’t have RSS either (there are RSS to email services you can use which will work better if they do, such as Feedblitz)
• You can also take that email and send it to an email-to-RSS service like MailBucket or Dodgeit (for the latter you will probably need to set up a bespoke email address, otherwise you’ll receive all your emails as an RSS feed). What you do with that RSS feed presents another set of possibilities.
• A note of caution, however: the reliability of the services is worth testing first – WebToMail and PageGetter still hadn’t sent my page days after I emailed the URL – only Web2Mail returned something within a day.

Those are just five ideas. The flexibility of email and RSS makes me think there must be more. Do you have any more?

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