Many seismological observatories have their seismograms and other important data (as e.g. locations of seismic events) available on-line in digital form. Most of these observatories are connected to an electronic mail network, and many of them have Internet connection. These advances allow the exchange of seismological data (parameters and waveforms) between different observatories for alert, monitoring and research purposes.

In order to automate data exchange and to free the observatory personnel for other tasks, a fully Automatic Data Request Manager (AutoDRM) has been developed and implemented at the Swiss Seismological Service.

An electronic mail (e-mail) connection is sufficient for full service. Data requests are sent via e-mail to the AutoDRM. The AutoDRM reads the request and schedules (usually already existing) programs to retrieve the desired data from the local system and writes the output to a file. Depending on the user's choice, the response of the AutoDRM is immediately sent to the requester by e-mail.