Abstract
Nowadays, WWW has become the most convenient way to gain information. However, the limitations of distance and bandwidth in the network may increase a user's perceived time of accessing WWW information. In order to provide an applicable system to supply better services to the clients, we study the characteristics of proxies and use web mail as an example service to see how proxies may support dynamic and advanced web services. In this thesis, we implement an active proxy system for web mail that provides advanced functions such as prefetching and filtering. We have developed the active proxy on top of the WBI environment and experimented different prefetching algorithms. Experiments running on the developed proxy show that if the prefetch process can be executed precisely, the user would never feel any difference while browsing the web mail pages. Furthermore, the average page loading time can be reduced up to 40%.