Okay, I took the bait and signed up. Looks like these guys aren't yet ready just yet, but it doesn't look too bad. It is an automated setup. Which means that since you upload and download mail and work OFFLINE, there is the possibility of hacking something together so that you can run some automators on your mailbox... i.e. ftp by mail, pass to pgp, remailer, etc... ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Wed, 21 Feb 1996 16:30:29 -0500 From: signup@juno.com Subject: Welcome to Juno! Thank you for your interest in Juno, our free Internet e-mail service. We are currently preparing for our launch, which we expect to take place before the end of the first quarter of 1996. <SNIPPAGE> President Juno Online Services, L.P. __________________________________________________________________________ FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS: 1) WHEN WILL JUNO BE AVAILABLE? We plan to release Juno in the first quarter of this year. 2) IS JUNO REALLY FREE? Yes. There are no monthly charges to use the service, no set-up fees, no per-message fees, and no hourly charges. You will be able to download the software off the Internet (or get it in a variety of other ways). 3) WHAT ABOUT PHONE CHARGES? It won't be necessary to dial a long-distance telephone number to reach us. We expect that ultimately the bulk of our users will dial into local access numbers we provide; we may also use toll-free numbers to supplement our coverage in some areas where local access numbers are not available. Also, note that when you use Juno, you are only connected by telephone to our central computers while you are in the process of uploading and downloading your new mail. When you're reading and writing your mail, you are offline. This means that the phone calls you do make are likely to be very short -- under one minute, in most cases. [*** All we need to do is figgure out their data structures for storing email and we're set to write something to process it. ***] <SNIPPAGE ABOUT HARDWARE SPEX> 7) WILL JUNO GIVE ME ACCESS TO THE INTERNET? Yes. Your messages will go out over the Internet, meaning that you will be able to send mail to and receive mail from anyone on the Internet or any of the commercial online services (such as America Online, CompuServe, and Prodigy). However, your computer will not be connected *directly* to the Internet. Your computer will be connected to our central computers, and our computers will be connected to the Internet. 8) DO I NEED TO HAVE INTERNET ACCESS FROM ANOTHER SOURCE TO USE JUNO? No. Juno gives you everything you need to send and receive e-mail over the Internet. <*** Here's the strings ****> 9) WHAT WILL THE ADVERTISING BE LIKE? One of the major reasons that we are able to provide you with e-mail for free is that Juno will carry advertising. (It's the same model that's used by radio and television.) However, it is our hope (and plan) to make the advertising we carry be of greater interest and value to you, and less of a nuisance, than the advertising you are so often bombarded with over other media. Each Juno user will fill out a "member profile" that will help us determine which advertisements to send to that user, what new services he or she might be most interested in hearing about, and what other sorts of information he or she might find useful. Our goal is to provide users with information that interests them and is relevant to their needs. The advertisements on Juno may take several forms; we don't know yet what all of them will be. Some ads will appear as interactive banners in the horizontal "Sponsor's Panel" at the upper right-hand corner of the screen. If you are interested in a product you see featured in this space, you will be able to click on the advertisement to request additional information. Other ads might appear while you are in the process of uploading and downloading your mail; still others might take the form of e-mail messages that arrive in your Inbox. (Never more than one or two of the latter in a given session, though, since getting a mailbox full of commercial e-mail messages would be very annoying. In most sessions you'll probably get none.) We plan to experiment with a variety of different approaches and figure out, by looking at people's responses, what works best. <More snippage>