Oh, good. Traffic is light again, so it's time for another draft. I have been presenting this as a FAQ but it does not address advanced technical issues of which I know little, like how to patch early Juno versions to do BCC. The old FAQ does that kind of thing well, while this more elementary catechism can serve better as a separate list of Introductory Questions. Seventh draft, middle June 2002 Several questions have minor expansions or clarifications. Capitalization of Juno_accmail is corrected. ================================================================ Frequently Asked Questions about Juno and the Juno_accmail: 1 Who's Juno? 2 Who's Juno_accmail? 3 What's the connection between the two? 4 What can Juno do for me? 5 How can Juno be any good if it's free? 6 Does "Offline" mean it's broken? 7 Can I use MS Outlook Express, Eudora, Netscape Mail and other industry standard mailing programs? 8 Do I have to use the offline mail program? 9 What do you mean, Web is limited on free Juno? 10 Is mail also limited? 11 What if I don't pick up my mail very day? 12 Can I get Juno on my Mac, Linux, OS/2, DOS machine, etc? 13 Can my antique 386/486 Personal Computer run Juno? 14 What does Juno's free Web require? 15 How can I get Juno? 16 How can I join Juno_accmail? 17 Will I get spammed? 18 Where did Juno come from? 19 Where did Juno_accmail come from? =============================================================== 1 Who's Juno? No, not the Roman goddess of marriage. Juno Online Services is a company trying to make money by providing free but limited Internet services, by putting ads on your screen as television stations do. They also hope you will come to enjoy the Web so much, and dislike the ads and the limits so much, that you will be willing to pay to use Juno without so many ads and limits. Most users, however, continue to accept the limited free ride. 2 Who's Juno_accmail? Juno_accmail is a bunch of amateurs who enjoy helping other people make good use of Juno's services. We do this by answering and discussing questions in a mailing list, and by providing auxiliary programs that you can download for free. 3 What's the connection between the two? None. One is a corporation; the other is a loose alliance of amateurs. With no connection between the two, it's no use to ask one of them to make the other be nicer to you or whatever. You can gripe to Juno_Accmail all you want, but we can only feel your pain and provide some free and possibly helpful information and software. Information from this friendly bunch of volunteers is always more plentiful, but sometimes less reliable, than what the Juno company will tell you. There are no Juno insiders at Juno_accmail, so you won't find any secrets. Some Accmail participants however, have spent a lot of brain power studying the company and its software, and are willing to share their findings with anyone who asks. Sometimes the company wishes we would provide less information, and occasionally an insider points out a bit of unwise advice or mistaken information. Usually they pay us no attention at all. 4 What can Juno do for me? Juno provides World Wide Web and E-mail services, as AOL and other Internet companies provide for their users. There are many minor differences among Internet providers but the big difference is that Juno is one of the few who are willing to provide free service. Actually even Juno makes most of its money out of paid users, but millions of us free riders are still tolerated. Paid Juno users do not pay as much as the users of AOL and other full-price services. Some families use a paid family account for Web, and free accounts for each family member's mail. 5 How can Juno be any good if it's free? Juno mail is quite good. It is reliable and it doesn't require modern powerful hardware. Mail is a cheap service for the company to provide, because you do your mail offline. The Juno mail program shows advertisements in the top of the window, and sometimes the company sends us advertising mail. You could call it spam but it isn't a lot, and the company of course doesn't like to call it that. Free Web service by Juno is not so good, since Web is expensive for the company to provide. You only get a limited number of hours online each month. While you are online you get more advertising, mostly in the form of an ad banner staying on the screen while you are online and annoying browser windows popping up over what you want to see. You're supposed to click on the ads to get more information about the product being advertised. If you pay for Juno, these annoyances are much lessened. 6 Does "offline" mean it's broken? No, this isn't Star Trek. Online means your computer is connected to Internet, tying up your phone line and many other communications resources to exchange data constantly even when there's no new data. Online time costs the company nickles per hour which most companies recover by charging you a monthly fee. Being online also prevents people from calling you. There's no need to be online while reading and writing mail, however, so Juno works offline. Juno's mail software calls the company, gets your incoming mail (usually in less than a minute), releases the phone line, and shows your mail. You use the built in editor to write your replies, if any. When they are all done, you click on "Send Mail" so the software will call to go online briefly again to send your replies. 7 Can I use MS Outlook Express, Eudora, Netscape Mail and other industry standard mailing programs? No. Juno does not support the POP3 standard. You can only use the Juno proprietary mailing program. If you don't like that, too bad. Juno's sister company NetZero supports POP3, and included a free version of Eudora on its turn of the century installation CDs. Some experienced people think this standard is important. 8 Do I have to use the offline mail program? You can read and write messages online at the company's Webmail site, http://webmail.juno.com if you have Web access. The software for this site was replaced in 2001 but users continued to complain that it was slow, confusing and inconvenient. It was replaced again in April 2002. Many users called it a real improvement. Juno's offline mailer works nicely for millions of free and paid users, who generally prefer it. Most Juno users only use the Web mailer when they are away from home, for example at a Web cafe, where they can only use software that's already there. Anyone who actually prefers Web mail over Juno's pleasant little offline mailer should consider using another service than Juno for mail. 9 What do you mean, Web is limited on free Juno? The advertising program slows down your computer while you are online, especially if it's already a slow old computer. There is also a limit on how many hours you can be online in a month. The company won't say what the limit is, however. Probably it's something like ten or twenty hours. Possibly it depends on what time of day you call and whether you're in a big city, and perhaps on many factors unknown. Heavy users who want to browse the Web almost every day, or for almost an hour per day, are likely to be unhappy with free Juno. They will be better off paying. Free service is for lightweights. 10 Is mail also limited? Various versions of Juno's mail software have various limits. The antique Version 1.49 has limits discussed below. Version 4 can display MIME fonts, colors and inline pictures but its editor will not put them into your messages as Version 5 will. The company may limit the length of messages or how many hundreds of messages you send per day. Free Juno is a consumer service, not intended for heavy or professional use. The company adds a Juno advertisement to the end of any message from a free Juno user that is not addressed to another Juno user. If it goes both to a Juno address and non Juno ones, the ad is still omitted. In May 2002 it was discovered that Juno 5 would only support up to nine accounts on one computer. There are no reports on whether the number of accounts is limited on earlier versions, You should keep enough disk space free to allow proper processing of messages. In Versions 1.49 and 4 that means as much space as the size of the largest folder. Since the Inbox is a folder, this is one of the reasons to clear messages from your Inbox after reading them. In Version 5 you need twice as much free space as all your stored messages put together. Some Juno 5 users have lost their old message folders, perhaps because they didn't have enough disk space. Version 4 can only have a thousand messages per folder, including the Inbox. None of this is a problem if you don't keep old messages, but some of us are packrats. 11 What if I don't pick up my mail every day? Incoming mail will accumulate at Juno's central computers. If you are not heard from for several months, perhaps a year or two, the company will delete your account and your unreceived mail. If anyone sends you a few Megabytes of mail (thousands of messages of usual length, for example, or dozens of especially long ones with pictures attached) your "mailbox" in Juno's central computers will fill up and reject all later messages until you call and download your messages. 12 Can I get Juno on my Mac, Linux, OS/2, DOS machine, etc? No. Juno's advertising feature requires MS-Windows 95 or later. Since advertising is how the free Juno service makes money for the company, you can't use another operating system. Of course, if your Mac, OS/2 or other computer has something added that makes it able to run Microsoft Windows applications, you can give Juno a try, and see what happens. No charge for trying, since it's a free service. 13 Can my antique 386/486 Personal Computer with Win 3.1 run Juno? An early version, Juno 1.49, can run under Windows 3.1x on a 386 or 486 with 4 Megs RAM. Theoretically, anyway. Actually some people find it useful in 6 Megs, though processing sometimes takes hours when a large amount of mail arrives. It's better with 8 Megs, and can be downright quick with 16. Thousands still use it happily but this antique version has mail only. No web. Message size is limited to approximately 50 Kilobytes which is less than ten thousand words. Juno 1.49 cannot handle attached files or MIME coding. Messages that are written in HTML or RTF formats will arrive with junk characters instead of the original fonts, colors and pictures, though the words are usually still readable. Some people count these inabilities as advantages, since colors and pictures are used mostly for advertising while attachments are the principal method of spreading viruses. Version 1.49 will not download large messages, including those that have pictures or other big files attached. Those messages will accumulate in your mailbox (see question 11) and clog it. Probably a few fools will send you attachments even when you ask them not to, so you must occasionally use a later Juno mail version or go to Juno's Webmail site (see question 8) and delete the messages that have attachments. The company stopped supporting Version 1.49 officially in the late 1990s and then stopped sending advertising for it to display. Late in November of 2001 a glitch in the company's server computers made Juno Version 1.49 stop working for a week or so. This can be taken as cause for caution for the thousands who still prefer using antiques. Some people, after all, prefer a high-wheel bicycle, for classic chainless simplicity. They just have to be cautious. 14 What does Juno's free Web require? MS-Windows 95 or later. Microsoft Internet Explorer 4 or later (any version that came with Windows 98 or later will do). 14.4 KBPS modem or faster. 486 or later, with 32 Megabytes RAM or more. 24 Megs can sometimes work, but other times it grinds to a halt when free Juno pops up a Web advertisement. Version 4 suffers somewhat less under conditions of short memory and small disk space than Version 5 does. You should expect no problems with most Pentium compatible computers from the late 1990s or after. Of course with computers we sometimes encounter problems we do not expect. Even with hardware that can easily handle Juno Version 5, many of us prefer the older Version 4, but not all tastes are this conservative. 15 How can I get Juno? If you've already got Web service, click on http://www.juno.com and sign up as a new user. It will show you how to download and install the latest version of the software. You can also call 1-888-TRY-JUNO to request a CD, but they are only interested in sending it to people who will pay for the service. If you know someone who has a Juno CD, you can use it or a copy of it. Copying is all right by the company. The CD can also install MS Internet Explorer if you don't already have it. If the Juno version on the CD is obsolete, it will upgrade itself automatically when you connect. A user of Juno 5 can click on the Help menu to see how to make an installation floppy for you. The floppy will have a small program to call Juno's computers and download the whole Juno program to you. For Version 1.49, the floppy has the whole program. The obsolete but still useful Juno versions 1.49 and 4.00.11 can be downloaded at: http://www.junoaccmail.org/download.htm Other versions were made, but company policy is to force them to upgrade as soon as you go online, so insted of downloading them you might as well get a version that works without updating. All the installation programs have a lot of dumb questions for you to answer, intended to help the company decide what to advertise to you. Earlier versions have more dumb questions. Some users lack patience to enter completely correct answers, but they still get accepted. 16 How can I join Juno_accmail? To subscribe to the Juno_accmail Mailing List, send a message to: ecartis@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx with "subscribe juno_accmail" in the subject or in the body. That day or the next day, you will get a message that you are accepted. The first message will be an introduction, telling how to receive Digests if you like. It will also tell you how to quit with an "unsubscribe juno_accmail" message if you get bored with it. 17 Will I get spammed? Juno sends free users a few E-mails per month advertising something. Most of us are not sensitive enough to mind. Those who mind, should pay for Internet service. Juno won't sell your name to advertisers, since the advertisers then wouldn't have to pay for future ads. Accmail won't sell your name to advertisers, but the messages we send to Accmail go to hundreds of people we don't know. Some people like to use their personal account for personal business, such as family, and keep a separate account for Accmail and other public discussions. If advertising became a nuisance, you could abandon that account and make up another name for another account for public discussions. Juno doesn't charge for additional accounts or say whether there is a limit on the number of accounts. Lots of people use half a dozen. I'm Jim Henderson and use jim.henderson@xxxxxxxx for all purposes. Yes, this free account gets some spam. Some of the spammers found me because I gave my address at Web sites. Others, I don't know. Juno Version 5 has a "Mail Assistant" spam filter, which has been useful to people who study it carefully rather than simply click on the "Block Sender" option which doesn't accomplish much. 18 Where did Juno come from? On April 22, 1996, D E Shaw & Co, owned by David Shaw, organized Juno Online Services to sell advertising by providing free E-mail service. Dr Shaw used to be a professor at Columbia University and a Vice President at Morgan Stanley. His company had made him rich by hooking together the computers of stockbrokers. He hired Charles Ardai as Juno's President, and sold Juno stock publicly in March of 1999. Entrepreneurs Ronald Burr, Stacy Haitsuka, Harold McKenzie and Marwan Zebian, with venture-capital backing (largely from IdeaLab), started NetZero late in 1996, providing free Web service. A bunch of smaller competitors copied that idea the next year, and Juno also started providing free Web. In 1998 Juno claimed to be the fastest growing ISP, and the following year both Juno and NetZero claimed to be the second biggest ISP after AOL. Briefly in 1999, before the bubble burst, some competitors went so far as to offer free DSL service and free computers so you could watch their ads. In 2000 both companies gobbled up a bunch of smaller companies that were mostly dying anyway because advertising rates declined. Hoping for a non advertising revenue stream, Juno promoted a screensaver scheme to use free riders' computers for major computation projects. It wasn't heard from after spring, 2001. The founders of NetZero left in mid-2001 to form Layer2Networks, a business-network-services provider. After fighting in court about patents, priorities and who was really bigger, Juno and NZ merged in late 2001 to form a company called United Online. The two services continued to be offered separately. 19 Where did Juno_accmail come from? Wow, said a bunch of amateur Internet old-timers in 1996, free mail? But only mail? No file transfers? How do we overcome that problem? A few months after Juno started, these industrious people cooked up the "Juno_accmail Project" to help people use E-mail and UUencoding to send and receive files, including programs and Web pages. There were already other accmail operations, for example at the University of Maryland, for people who had E-mail but not Web or FTP service, but this new one was set up with Juno users in mind. As it turned out, the Juno_accmail Mailing List and www.junoaccmail.org Web site that helped in this work could also help people with various aspects of Juno's software and service. In the late 1990s Juno and other companies started providing free Web service. Mail users who wanted files and Web pages but didn't have Web service became scarce, so the original purpose of accmails didn't matter as much. However, without charging any money to users, the Juno company could not afford to pay someone to talk on the phone to free riders who had questions or difficulties using the software. So, Juno_accmail's technical help continued to be relevant, and nowadays it's mostly a help club. To unsubscribe, send a message to ecartis@xxxxxxxxxxxxx with "unsubscribe juno_accmail" in the body or subject. OR visit //freelists.org ~*~