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Abstract

W3Gate, a mail gateway developed by GMD to fill the gap between email and WWW, was presented for the first time to an international audience during the JENC7 conference in May 1996. We run W3Gate as a regular value-added service in the meantime and its usage grew up to 7 GB traffic a month. Not only people with a poor Internet connectivity use it but also people who like to work asynchronously or people who have to cross a firewall to access WWW.

In this paper we describe our experiences with the use and abuse of W3Gate in the last months. Due to load and security considerations and influenced by postmasters and end users suggestions we changed W3Gate s functionality and set-up several times. Finally, a complete redesign became unavoidable.

Our paper describes the development of a useful software package to a regular value-added service. It shows that it is not easy to predict end users needs and behaviour and that the times where you write a piece of code, make a service out of it and offer it to the community on easy terms is definitely over.