Website sends websites via e-mail

If you've ever tried to save a website, you already know that most browsers do a poor job at best. Sure there's a "Save Page" option on the File pull-down menu but just give it a try and you'll see what I mean. Depending on the brand of browser you're using, you will get different results. In fact, you'll most likely get different results saving different website pages from within the same browser. Most browsers will save website pages but they won't really look much like the original. Depending on the web page's content such as links, embedded JavaScript, applets, animations and more, you can be fairly sure that what you are saving won't really resemble what was originally there. But there's a website that attempts to save websites by e-mailing them directly.

EmailTheWeb.com is set up so that you can easily e-mail most any web page and it lets you do so at no charge. You may ask yourself why not just e-mail the webpage's address. You can but remember that web pages are constantly changing and what you want them to see may have changed by the time they read your e-mail. Chances are highly likely that the webpage's content will somehow change sooner or later. By using EmailTheWeb.com, the page you see is the one that the recipient will get.

According to the site's developer, there may be some small inconsistencies but things should be close if not exact to what you saw when you sent it. Using EmailTheWeb.com is a snap. Just type in the web address and click the send button. You can elect to send the web page as an attachment or send it inline, which means you will see the actual web page within the body of the e-mail itself. You are prompted to enter the e-mail addresses to which you want the captured web page delivered. There's even a checkbox that lets you e-mail it to yourself since EmailTheWeb.com has automatically detected your e-mail address. FireFox users are offered an extension that helps aid in the accuracy of the transmission.

Other options let you preview your captured page or view the live page itself. You can add a subject line and there's even a line for additional notes you want to send to the recipient.

Once you're ready to send, you just click the send button at the bottom of the screen and that's pretty much it. I tested out EmailTheWeb.com by sending myself a copy of my radio talk show's website home page. I typed in http://www.computeramerica.com and hit the send button. The home page that appeared in my Microsoft Entourage e-mail inbox was dead on. Even the font was the same although experimentation on some other websites yielded a few slight discrepancies. Still, the accuracy of the transmitted website was far more accurate than anything else I had tried to use in the past. And now there's the ExactPage feature that further enhances the accuracy of rich website pages and adds more compatibility with different e-mail applications.

Other nice features let all of the links that appear in the sent website to be completely active yet all JavaScript on a page is automatically stripped out. This protects your recipient from popups and other annoying and sometimes malicious activity.

If you find yourself needing to accurately capture and send a web page complete with all of its links and do it all for free, then you'd best check out EmailTheWeb.com. The service is offered for free with some limitations such as only being able to send 25 emails a day. Their Silver, Gold and Platinum services add more sends per day as well as archiving and more usage of ExactPage. Check out their website for more details.

www.EmailTheWeb.com

Craig Crossman is a national newspaper columnist writing about computers and technology. He also hosts the No. 1 daily national computer radio talk show, Computer America, heard on the Business TalkRadio Network and the Lifestyle TalkRadio Network - Monday through Friday, 10 p.m.-midnight ET. For more information, visit his web site at www.computeramerica.com.

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