4theFile is a service that turns email messages into shareable, web-addressable "Resources" that can be linked from other applications, blogs, forums, social media, etc. It allows you to easily "attach" an email anywhere you can use a regular web link. Here's a diagram that shows how it works.
No. You don't need an account to use 4theFile. However, if you do register for an account you'll get access to some extra features, including: stats, lists of your resources and collections, ability to delete or redact previously submitted Resources, and ability to add previously submitted Resources to a Collection
The basic service and basic registered account will always be free. There may be small fees associated with some advanced features in the future, possibly including: "permanent" Resource retention, increased storage quota, and business usage of the API.
As an end user, you can use a 4theFile resource any place you can put a regular http url. Most blogs, wikis, forums, twitter, and other social media automatically make http URLs into clickable links. Your operating system probably supports dragging URLs from your browser's location bar into a folder or onto your desktop.
As a developer, there are many options available to you to use 4theFile Resources in your application, or to use 4theFile as an email front end to your app, as described in our Integration section.
Yes. We have a REST API that provides simple access to your Resources and Collections, with filtering by tags to allow assigning Resources to individual objects in your app.
They're stored on our servers.
Yes. Resources submitted from any of your verified email addresses will be automatically added to your account's Resource list. See the Email Address FAQ for more info.
Once you've verified your resource by accessing it at least once in the first 48 hours, it will be kept on the web as long as people are accessing it. If the a period of 6 months goes by with no accesses, the Resource will be removed. In the near future, you will have the option of requesting "permanent" retention.
In addition, we promise that if we decide to stop offering the 4theFile service for any reason, we won't leave you out in the cold. We'll provide at least 12 months notice of our intent to shut down, published on the homepage and sent by email to registered users, during which time we'll continue to provide access to existing Resources. We'll also provide an easy method of archiving your Resources.
Check your Spam folder! Some email services such as Gmail and Yahoo have a "shoot first, ask questions later" policy towards unrecognized senders. If you do find a 4theFile notification in your Spam folder and click the "Not Spam" button, you will receive future 4theFile emails in your regular inbox. If that doesn't work, it might help to add notifier@4thefile.com to your address book.
Another possible reason for a missing response email is that your email exceeded the maximum allowable size.
Each 4theFile "resource" is accessible only by its random "secret" URL. We assign a URL from over 200 trillion possible random URLs, so nobody's going to guess yours. You control whom you share it with. Knowing the URL of one resource does not enable someone to find out any information about the owner, or view other resources with the same owner. The resources in 4theFile are not searchable, and will not show up in search engines such as Google.
You can optionally use https links to your resources, so that they will be encrypted with SSL when transferred from 4theFile.com to a user's browser.
Use our Redact function. "Redact" is a funky intelligence community term for blacking out the most sensitive parts of a confidential document before releasing it to the public.
You can redact words or phrases using the edit link in the response email you received from 4theFile when you submitted the Resource, or through the Registered User interface.
Probably not. 4theFile is for sharing selected email messages as web "Resources". It's not a general purpose email service, and it doesn't have standard email functions like "reply", "forward" etc.
Cutting and pasting email content is almost always an exercise in frustration. Long lines get wrapped, formatting is lost, and in the case of html emails, any content in embedded images is lost completely. Also, the valuable header information (original sender, original date stamp) is usually not included in the pasted message body.
In a word, "No". Nearly every email program uses its own proprietary storage format, and many don't have any convenient way of extracting a single message into a standard file format that's easily read by all web users.
The closest thing there is to a standard email file format is the .eml format, and that's not very easy to work with or well supported. If you click on a .eml link in your browser, probably nothing useful will happen.
Probably not. You need to log in to your webmail account, right? And even if you had a way of making a webmail message public (no login needed), there are other problems: you don't want other people to be able to change it or delete it. And if you ever delete or refile your message into another folder, you'll probably break the existing links to it.
No problem... the response email that you received when you submitted the email originally includes a link that will allow you to delete (or "redact") the resource. Or, if you're a registered user, you can find and delete or redact previous submissions through your 4theFile account's web interface.
Collections are groups of related Resources. You can submit a Resource to a Collection using a custom Collection email address. See our Collection FAQ for more info. A Collection may be associated with an external application, as described in the Integration Center.
4theFile will not accept submissions whose total size exceeds 5MB
Currently the storage quota is 200MB per user. In the future, we may charge a small fee for additional storage.