🚀 go-pugleaf

ignatz@chinet.chi.il.us (Dave Ihnat) wrote in
<1992Jun20.205516.11257@chinet.chi.il.us>:

| In article <1992Jun13.165624.5694@ddsw1.mcs.com> dattier@ddsw1.mcs.com
| (David W. Tamkin) writes:

[Doug Krick was in a hurry to find a way to exchange email with someone on
GEnie.  There being no gateway yet, I said this:]

| >Yes: GEnie has an indial node in Naperville, which should be a local call for
| >you from Wheaton.  Open your own GEnie account and you can exchange all the
| >email you like with other GEnie customers.

Dave Ihnat responded thus:

| David, don't be so disparaging.

I don't see where I disparaged anything there, Dave.  The only facet of this
topic of which I'd speak ill is the rumor mill that has been giving overop-
timistic estimates for more than a year now of when GEnie would make its
gateway available to all customers.  I didn't even believe that the gateway
was real until I heard about it specifically from Andy Finkenstadt, because
for all I knew the other posters who talked about it might just have been
enthusiastically repeating things they had been happy to hear.

One reason for my saying "all the mail you like" is that there might be a
per-letter charge to send or read Internet mail once GEnie has the gateway
implemented.  That may add up to more than $4.95 a month, so if the traffic
is heavy enough it may be more cost effective to open a GEnie account.  I'm
not pushing that; if I were I'd be emailing Doug to wait until GEnie's
referral promotion starts July 1 and to say I sent him so that I could get
the referral credit.

| Gatewaying of the different proprietary Email networks is, for many people,
| an exceedingly attractive and desirable thing.

No disagreement there!

| Just because you like and use COMPUSERVE, for instance, on a regular
| basis doesn't mean that I should.

I like CompuServe?  Where did you get that idea?  I use GEnie far, far more
than I use CIS, as a comparison of my billing will show.  My May bill for
GEnie was $49.95; for CIS it was under $3.00.  Given that GEnie has more
areas with no per-hour charge that I use and that the connect fee, where it
applies, is lower than CIS's, you can see that I use GEnie much more.  Where
did you get the idea that I was promoting CompuServe?

Moreover, when it comes to email, CIS has in the past been embarrassed in
at least two incidents of examining or even censoring users' email; GEnie's
reputation for email privacy is impeccable.

Quite honestly, if a GEnie subscriber has an urgent need for email connection
to the Internet and cannot wait for GEnie's gateway to open, and if said
person cannot get a Nixpub or NetPub connection, and if said person asked me
for advice, I'd recommend MCI Mail *long* before CompuServe.  Since I haven't
seen GEnie's gateway in operation yet, maybe I'll come to recommend GEnie
even over MCI Mail once it gets going.  You didn't know that because there
had been no cause for me to register my opinion on the matter.

| And even if I *do*, it would mean that I'd have to check my mailbox on all
| systems on which I have Email--I have to do that now for a couple, and it's
| a pain.

It certainly is.  That's why people with multiple email drops often forward
(at least non-local) mail from all of them to one central place if they can. 
Neither CIS nor MCI Mail, as far as I know, allows that.  GEnie will let you
delegate mail to another GEnie mailbox, but I'll be very surprised if, once
the gateway opens, they'll allow delegation to remote addresses, because
sending a letter back out to the Internet will cost GEnie more than just
filing it in a different place within GEnie.

| What we *do* have to work on is getting the rates for Email to be fair and
| affordable...

No disagreement there either.

David W. Tamkin   Box 59297   Northtown Station, Illinois  60659-0297
dattier@ddsw1.mcs.com    CompuServe: 73720,1570    MCI Mail: 426-1818