Jim - >Me too, pretty much. I had E-mail in the early 1990s from BBSes, lost >it >when they went out of business, and regained it when Juno started. ----- Been there, done that, stuck to BBSs quite a bit longer than you did. >Juno's monthly time allowance is, for all practical purposes, secret. >When someone goes over their limit, they simply get disconnected. >This >suggests to the ignorant masses that Juno has become so unreliable >that >they have to go to AOL. ------ I had Prodigy for about a year somewhere around 1991/2. One of the reasons I dropped it was that every disconnect was my fault - including their overnight maintenance. They could have at least given us five minutes warning! The difficulty with using the library here is that they had a half hour limit and you could only sign up twice in a two hour time period. Or maybe you had to wait two hours to sign up again. Last time I was there, though, I think the limit had been increased to an hour. One difficulty is that you can't save bookmarks so you have to type everything in. ("They" need library versions of browsers that allow saving such things to disk and retrieving from disk....) Also, even when I've provided my own email address for a reply, whoever you're writing may not use it. My sister has received such replies but library replies are undoubtedly lost. >A Frenchman in the early 19th Century remarked about a notoriously >devious and unsuccessful political maneuver: "A crime? This is worse >than a crime. It's a blunder!" > The problem is that >hundreds of thousands of potentially paying subscribers, millions of >dollars in revenues, are being lost through simple blunders. If Juno >alone is making such a mess of things, what will happen if the merger >goes through and an attempt is made to slide all the free users over >to >NetZero? Will millions find themselves cut off and clueless? ----- Not surprisingly, I'm concerned that I'll lose email completely, that they won't accomodate those of us with older equipment. I sent part of the news release about the NetZero hours cutback to my sister. As mentioned in a message a few days ago, she's just trying it out now. She sent them a series of questions to which they auto-responded with a list of responses she could download. I saw three in a row that were absolutely identical.... One that she still doesn't have an answer to is when a new month starts if she's hit her time limit, which will be much easier to do with a drop to ten hours from 40. What time zone do they use - GMT, MST (we never do Daylight), or California time where they're located? >After signing up my customer in a middle class part of Brooklyn, I >bicycled over the Gowanus Canal to a playground where I found a boy, >now >thirteen, whom I hooked up to Juno a year earlier than that one. >While >he was defeating me at a game that involves sliding checkers into a >plastic rack to form four in a row, I asked about his free Juno Web. >It's working fine but he is unaware that the company is changing its >policy about free service. > His mother, a >hairdresser, is unlikely to be able to afford $100 per year for >Internet >service. I don't know what I'm going to do about him. Well, I intend >to >rehabilitate an old inkjet for him, but as for his Web service, I >don't >know. At least he'll still have free mail. I hope. ----- Surely you have a freeweb - government funded - in your area. I know they've been discussed on the list in the past. I remember checking a website from the library but couldn't access the spot I needed - I could see it briefly before an ad covered it. Arizona's is available via Arizona State University. It was email only when I signed up and I never figured out how to use it. Didn't try real hard, I admit. I was too spoiled by .QWK mail to want to do the on-line, can't quote, non-address book, etc., thing. I've been told that web access became available, text only. Don't know what the current status is, but I really find it hard to believe that an area the size of New York doesn't have something similar. You know, I think you should send the message I've quoted from to the powers-that-be, though they probably won't listen. Aren't you close enough to deliver it in person? Carolyn Stoffel Rakena Basenjis - Puppup and Cotton The Canine Contingent; The Puppuppies - Pendant, Insula, Mosey Phoenix, Arizona carolynstoffel@xxxxxxxx (No Internet access) http://rakena.freeyellow.com/index.html ________________________________________________________________ GET INTERNET ACCESS FROM JUNO! Juno offers FREE or PREMIUM Internet access for less! Join Juno today! For your FREE software, visit: http://dl.www.juno.com/get/tagj. To unsubscribe, send a message to listar@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx with "unsubscribe juno_accmail" in the body or subject. OR visit http://freelists.dhs.org ~*~