Some of my friends work in IT companies where they have very limited or no access to the Internet. All these people have corporate email accounts and spend a large part of the day fiddling with Microsoft Outlook but they aren’t so lucky when it comes to browsing the Internet in Office as most websites are inaccessible because of the strict IT policies.

How do you deal with such a situation? The fears that employees could leak sensitive data or that work productivity could decline due to the Internet are probably some of the reasons why bosses have to take this stringent step of banning web access at work.

If you happen to find yourself in such a situation and need web access for valid reasons, your email could be a big help as you can surf almost every website through a simple mail.

Get Websites via Email

Rediff has introduced a new web page fetching service called Web In Mail that lets you read web pages in your Inbox. You send an email to browse@webinmail.com with the website address in the subject and they’ll immediately send you the full web page as an email message.

For example, if you want to read the current CNN news headlines, compose a blank email message addressed to browse@webinmail.com and put cnn.com as the subject line. You will get an email back with the full CNN homepage and links to all stories that are on the front page of CNN.

That’s where it gets even more interesting. Click any link in the email to retrieve that story by email again so you can even deep surf websites through this service.

Web In Mail even lets you search the web via email. For instance, if you want to see top web pages about Mumbai terror attacks, send an email with the subject google: Mumbai terror attacks and they’ll send you the Google results for that query.

And while there’s no complex command to remember here, in case you forget the google syntax – just send a blank email to the same email address and you’ll get a quick help guide in your inbox.

Asked By: Amit Agarwal [41 ]