 Also, FTP e-mail gateways allowed people that lived outside the US and Europe to download files using ftp commands written inside email messages.The file was encoded, broken in pieces and sent by email; the receiver had to reassemble and decode it later, and it was the only way for people living overseas to download items such as the earlier Linux versions using the slow dial-up connections available at the time.After the popularization of the Web and the HTTP protocol such tools were slowly abandoned.