Public Access Obsolete. Capitalism offers free email

The NYT's Cybertimes reports 
(http://www.nytimes.com/library/cyber/week/0219email.html)

that two companies are preparing to offer free email to customers who agree
to be barraged by ads.  Juno and Freemark will soon offer free email to all
(Americans).

http://www.freemark.com/freemark.html

http://www.juno.com/

And since you can do (almost) anything with email that you can do with the
rest of the net (just more slowly and less conviniently) I guess we don't
have to worry about government-provided public access any more.

DCF

frissell@panix.com (Duncan Frissell) wrote:
>that two companies are preparing to offer free email to customers who agree
>to be barraged by ads.  Juno and Freemark will soon offer free email to all
>(Americans).
>
>http://www.freemark.com/freemark.html
>
>http://www.juno.com/
>
>And since you can do (almost) anything with email that you can do with the
>rest of the net (just more slowly and less conviniently) I guess we don't
>have to worry about government-provided public access any more.


It might be a cheap safe way to set up a remailer too...

Duncan writes:
# two companies are preparing to offer free email to customers who agree
# to be barraged by ads.  Juno and Freemark will soon offer free email to all
# (Americans).

Nobody writes:
> It might be a cheap safe way to set up a remailer too...

I'd be (very pleasantly) surprised if they will let you run code on the free
email account. After all, if you could, you could install a filter like 
procmail and automatically trash most of the junk mail :}

-Lewis	"You're always disappointed, nothing seems to keep you high -- drive 
	your bargains, push your papers, win your medals, fuck your strangers;
	don't it leave you on the empty side ?"  (Joni Mitchell, 1972)

> Nobody writes:
> > It might be a cheap safe way to set up a remailer too...
> 
> I'd be (very pleasantly) surprised if they will let you run code on the free
> email account. After all, if you could, you could install a filter like 
> procmail and automatically trash most of the junk mail :}

	Who says the code has to run on their machine.  Just forward
all incoming mail off to another box, and send all the outgoing mail out
from the free account.  Depending of course on whether it's some sort
of shell account or if you POP/SMTP to their box.

	Just an idea.

---
Fletch                                                     __`'/|
fletch@ain.bls.com  "Lisa, in this house we obey the       \ o.O'    ______
404 713-0414(w)      Laws of Thermodynamics!" H. Simpson   =(___)= -| Ack. |
404 315-7264(h) PGP Print: 8D8736A8FC59B2E6 8E675B341E378E43  U      ------

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----

> > > It might be a cheap safe way to set up a remailer too...
> > 
> > I'd be (very pleasantly) surprised if they will let you run code on the free
> > email account. After all, if you could, you could install a filter like 
> > procmail and automatically trash most of the junk mail :}
> 
> 	Who says the code has to run on their machine.  Just forward
> all incoming mail off to another box, and send all the outgoing mail out
> from the free account.  Depending of course on whether it's some sort
> of shell account or if you POP/SMTP to their box.

Although I haven't looked into this at all, somehow I can see them
requiring some sort of proprietary mailreader that *won't* let you
delete the ads without reading them (and probably not standards-based
either, so you couldn't replace it with something that would let you
skip the ads.)

Foo. You get what you pay for.

- --mark

Mark S. Cornick                      mailto:mark@evol.resnet.jmu.edu
Harrisonburg, VA                   http://evol.resnet.jmu.edu/~mark/
(for not much longer, though)         pgp key 84F8C8AD on keyservers
                                    or mail w/ subject "get pgp-key"

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: 2.6.2
Comment: Processed by Mailcrypt 3.4, an Emacs/PGP interface

iQCVAwUBMStWNQJ9CGSE+MitAQE/igP+N+N8bVMw/B+5ZqaYzrAZ4qpicCaHw3aM
+luk5/JQtPxFZ64dUMoSJOS2sSw/VIfI2KCL++UcB0+y0Mzv+LlMZsbHwkZjmUXH
2F1HiFvTql+U4rfGWVO7C/lOXQn1jENbesG7zrRkhPeruoKPr5Wjiec1rm3s4s9t
nUu3txVQnfY=
=JVFc
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----