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October 14, 2017 12:40 PM   Subscribe

I have a Kindle DX with free 3G. I never took to reading books on Kindle, but you'll pry the free 3G out of my cold, dead hands. What flat HTML websites do you recommend? Images are fine, but no Ajax or https:// or whatever else. I am aware of the options for converting a webpage to text-only, but I'm interested in native websites. In particular, I'd like to find a text-only, non-https:// email client. This is really hard to find these days. Thank you for any suggestions!
posted by 8603 to Computers & Internet (4 answers total) 3 users marked this as a favorite
 
Is the DX browser really not able to surf secure websites?

You're not going to find an email client for the DX...you need to jailbreak the Kindle to run non-Amazon software on it (and there is little "active content" for even classic Kindles), and I don't remember hearing about an email client for jailbroken Kindles. In addition, I doubt anyone is going to host email without security, so if the DX's experimental browser really can't handle HTTPS, you'll be more and more out of luck, as Google is making serious efforts to force as many websites as possible worldwide to use HTTPS.

You can try the simple HTML version of Gmail, but I doubt it's usable without HTTPS.

Finally, if you're not aware, I believe Amazon has limited 3G access on classic models like the DX to 50MB a month, which may be plenty for text-only browsing.

You may just need to experiment on another device to find pages that work well without Javascript and make note of them for DX surfing.
posted by lhauser at 1:36 PM on October 14, 2017


Response by poster: I misspoke--not an email client, but a webmail interface is what I want.

Https:// theoretically works, but in practice won't load.
posted by 8603 at 2:06 PM on October 14, 2017


Best answer: Here's a discussion on text-only sites over at Hacker News from about a year ago, and a more recent question over on Ask.

"Thin" sites became a thing again recently after the hurricanes and other disasters prompted people to look for information on their phones using limited data - CNN and NPR being the most useful in this respect.
posted by JoeZydeco at 2:24 PM on October 14, 2017 [1 favorite]


If you've got an existing email account which supports POP or IMAP (many do), you might be able to use mail2web.com. You might even be able to use Gmail with mail2web, though perhaps with some initial frustration.

I would not use it for an email account whose security I cared about. Personal messages, sure; banking, legal, or business, nope.
posted by clawsoon at 3:44 PM on October 14, 2017


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