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Introduction

You can send an ARCQUERY session as an electronic mail message to the archive mailserver at RGO, Cambridge (UK). The mailserver runs as a detached process on the captive account and samples mail every half hour. If a message of the proper type is found, the server reads it, and assembles a command procedure to run ARCQUERY with the instruction specified in your message. Results of the query session are returned to your E-mail address.

Originally, the server was intended for remotely accessing the archive from query software installed elsewhere. In that set-up the software composes the proper server message in an interactive session with the user, and forwards it to the mailserver at RGO. This construction is at the moment only operational from the NFRA site (Dwingeloo, Netherlands). However, an experienced archive user may benefit from using the mailserver to query the archive, because there is no need to login at the archive site. Moreover, writing the message, e.g. with a text editor, is dead simple, but a user should be aware of some tricky aspects of server queries.

Queries via the server use a different part of the workspace allocated to the archive. In particular, an initialization file on the captive account is not accessible to the server (you have to define symbols with your mail message).