Mail Addresses through WAIS

WAIS stands for Wide Area Information Servers, and is an architecture for a distributed information retrieval system. WAIS is based on the client server model of computation, and allows users of computers to share information using a common computer-to-computer protocol.

Many of the sources of information for finding a person's electronic mail address are available through WAIS. These include the Network Information Center (NIC) whois data base, the UUCP Maps and Usenet address server.

One advantage of WAIS is that it provides a unified interface to many types of information sources.

In addition to use of WAIS for finding e-mail addresses, many use it for the purpose of indexing their e-mail archives. WAIS is very useful for searching loosely structured text such as e-mail messages.