Forwared message from Pres. of juno.com

[Rabid Wombat <wombat@mcfeely.bsfs.org>]

Just thought I'd pass this along. I had jumped all over Juno on the list 
after the "talker" started, and tarred all of juno with the same brush. I 
was rather harsh on a company that I really don't know all that much 
about, except by judging a small sample of its clients.

Sorry, Charles, and good luck with the grand social experiment.

- r.w.


---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Fri, 13 Sep 1996 15:25:58 -0400
From: Charles Ardai <charles@staff.juno.com>
To: Rabid Wombat <wombat@mcfeely.bsfs.org>
Subject: Annoying spam incident(s)

Hi.

Your posting to cypherpunks was brought to my attention, and I wanted to
take a minute to respond.  (I also forwarded a copy of it to
"postmaster@juno.com", where we have a (small) staff of people to deal with
incidents like the one you ran into.  If you run into more in the future,
please e-mail the information to that address.) Since this is not directly
relevant to cypherpunks, I'm replying directly to you, but you are welcome
to forward this note to the list if you want.

> Complaints about spamming and cross-posting probably won't get you far,
> either. On-Net spamvertizing seems to be their source of revenue. Perhaps
> shaw.net needs to be contacted instead.

A couple of clarifications: Juno has never sent a single piece of spam and,
as long as I have anything to say about it, never will.  We provide a free
e-mail service which is paid for by advertising, but the advertising takes
the form of graphical banners built into Juno's custom interface and the
ads only appear on the screens of Juno's members.  We have never sent any
ads by e-mail, and have never sent any online ads of any sort to anyone who
was not one of our members.

What's more, we expressly prohibit the use of Juno to transmit commercial
solicitations in the Service Agreement that all members have to accept before
they can create a Juno account.  When we hear about violations, we
investigate and (if it seems appropriate) take actions up to and including
terminating a violator's account on our service.  Needless to say, we do
not read or in any way screen the mail our members send or receive, so
until we hear about a spamming incident we have no way to prevent a
particular piece of spam from being transmitted; but I promise you we do
listen to the complaints we receive and act on them as quickly as we
responsibly can.  In short, we do not send spam, we do not tolerate spam,
and we will not allow our service to become a home to spammers.

Note that today we supply e-mail to more than 400,000 members, and over
6000 people create Juno accounts every day.  At this rate of growth, we can
expect to have millions of members by this time next year.  The vast
majority of our members use our service responsibly; it's only a fraction
of a fraction of one percent who send spam.  I appreciate your frustration
at dealing with these abusers of our service -- and believe me, they don't
frustrate you half as much as they do us -- but I ask that you not penalize
the hundreds of thousands of responsible Juno members (and those users of
your network who want to communicate with them) because of the actions of
the handful of miscreants doing their best to give us a bad name.  Juno has
no more (and, alas, no less) spam-producing potential or control over the
spam its members send than Netcom, AOL, CompuServe, or any other e-mail
provider.  (We're slightly better, perhaps, because Juno currently offers
its members no tools for direct posting to newsgroups or information about
mail->news gateways, and slightly worse because it is possible to get a
Juno account without having to give us a credit card number.)

By shutting off access to your network by our members' mail you hurt the
spammers only minimally -- they'll find another address elsewhere and spam
again, I'm afraid -- but may hurt Juno quite a lot.  And since we're the
only major provider of free e-mail in the country today, I'd hate to see
the service needlessly or inappropriately hurt.  (I also have personal
reasons, of course, for not wanting to see Juno hurt.)

I apologize for the length of this message, and if we have been
unresponsive to your past complaints I apologize for that as well.
If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to contact me directly.

Best regards,

Charles Ardai
President
Juno Online Services, L.P.