About Critical Path Internet Services

The Critical Path AIDS Project was founded by Kiyoshi Kuromiya, who demonstrated that the Internet can provide a cost-effective means of delivering life-saving information to otherwise hard-to-reach populations.

After his death from AIDS in 2000, Philadelphia FIGHT continued and expanded his work to offer Internet services to the larger community.

Today, the Critical Path Project offers a suite of Internet services to the following:

Persons living with HIV/AIDS
Persons affected by those living with HIV/AIDS
Persons who may be at risk for such infection
Persons who are low-income and cannot afford traditional Internet services
Persons working in the HIV/AIDS community or healthcare professions
Other non-profits or no-profits in the Philadelphia region.
Activists, organizers, and persons who want to be connected to the larger HIV/AIDS community.
Allied groups working for wider social justice.

Critical Path is a homegrown Internet backbone to dozens of local activist groups, community coalitions, and other non-profit organizations as well as the only affordable way for thousands of low-income individuals in the Philadelphia region to access the Internet.

Services

Email

We offer free web-based email using a program called IMP. Send and receive email to from any computer with Internet Access.
Because we are a non-profit, we cannot offer unlimited amounts of space to hold all your mail. All email accounts receive 15 MB of space.
If you are a heavy email user, we suggest using an Email Client to download your mail. Critical Path works with Outlook, Outlook Express, Eudora, Entourage, Thunderbird, or any other email client.
Unlike many web-based email programs, Critical Path email accounts have no advertising, and do not track any email that is sent or received by you.
Critical Path will not hand over any personal information to anyone without a legal requirement.

Learn how to configure Critical Path for Outlook, Entourage, Thunderbird, etc

Electronic Mailing Lists

Mailing lists are a great way for a group of people to email each other without remembering everyone’s email address. They are perfect for activist groups, affinity groups, and other community groups organizing around a topic or issue.

Mailing lists feature the following.

Many people can share information on a particular subject.
You can administer your own list after it is set up.
Users can subscribe and unsubscribe to the list without bothering you.
List owner may restrict who subscribes (closed list) or may choose not to restrict subscribers (open list.)
Messages can be archived for future reference
List owners can moderate the list to scan postings before they go out to everyone.
We use a software program called Mailman to host lists.

Learn more about Mailman

Note: Critical Path reserves the right to refuse creation of any electronic Mailing Lists that do not meet the mission and vision of Critical Path.

Website Hosting

We host non-profit or community websites.
We do not host commercial or personal websites.
All websites must register a domain BEFORE applying for a Critical Path website account.
If you do not already have a domain name, register your domain name with a domain name registration service such as GoDaddy or Network Solutions. There is a yearly fee for registering a domain name.
Websites hosted on Critical Path can be enabled to use any of the following:

C++
Perl,
JAVA
SSL encryption
PHP
CGI scripts
Database Hosting with MySQL

We are NOT a web design organization. We cannot design, create, or modify your website. Our small help desk staff cannot answer questions regarding specific HTML code, Java or CGI scripts, Perl, or MySQL databases.
We recommend YIKES, Inc. to help you with any website design issues that you may have. Please contact them at: YIKES.

Note: No Web pages may contain illegal, copyrighted or pornographic material.

Note: Critical Path reserves the right to shut down any website that it hosts if it discovers that your website has been compromised by hackers and spammers until the issue is resolved.

Note: Critical Path reserves the right to refuse hosting a website that does not meet its mission and vision. If you feel that Critical Path has unfairly refused to host your website, please feel free to send us a letter formally spelling out how your website fits in with our vision and mission. The Critical Path team is happy to review all such inquiries.

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