Most of current information retrieval systems are deployed on high-speed network and high-power environment. For those great increasingly popular mobile devices with low-speed network and low-power environment, to intensively retrieve the information on the Internet is difficult. In this paper, we propose a framework named EMARE (stand for E-mail based Mobile Agent Runtime Environment) to solve the difficulty. EMARE provides users to retrieve desired information via mobile devices over the Internet. The mobile device can be a mobile phone, PDA, or handheld PC. Take advantage of the compatibility of the e-mail protocol, EMARE can be uniformly accessed by those versatile devices. Furthermore, we, in the proposed framework, also utilize mobile agent technologies to enhance the ability of mobile devices. The experiments show that EMARE is an ideal mobile computing framework with cost-effective communications, unified user interface, and ease-of-deployment features.