Path: utzoo!telecom-request Date: Sat, 27 Apr 91 19:53 GMT From: "Donald E. Kimberlin" <0004133373@mcimail.com> Newsgroups: comp.dcom.telecom Subject: Re: Prodigy Questions Message-ID: Organization: TELECOM Digest Sender: Telecom@eecs.nwu.edu Approved: Telecom@eecs.nwu.edu X-Submissions-To: telecom@eecs.nwu.edu X-Administrivia-To: telecom-request@eecs.nwu.edu X-Telecom-Digest: Volume 11, Issue 311, Message 2 of 4 Lines: 79 In article (Digest v11, iss303), Arnette P. Baker asks: > I am looking for information on Prodigy. I am looking into it because > my parents just bought a PC and are looking for things to do with it > ...question I have involves e-mail. Prodigy's interpretaion of what constitutes "mail," particularly e-mail, has been a particular point of discussion. It seems that from the perspective of a lot of the public, Prodigy wants to have its cake and eat it too, in that they CHARGE you for its delivery, and then CENSOR anything they don't like. Even the Postal Service doesn't look inside your envelope when you mail something, even though that may be something objectionable. We can. of course, understand an electronic bulletin board's System Operator reserving the right to delete items not in keeping with the Sysop's policies. But Prodigy seems to be trying to go a step further, charging you for more than a minimal amount of transmission, and heavily censoring what it transports. This might sound incredible, but the press report I saw at the peak of public outrage concerned Prodigy censoring a message in which a coin collector was asking about "Roosevelt dimes." When he asked the Prodigy staff why they deleted his mail, the unbelievably stupid retort was that "pro{oting personalities is prohibited." When he pressed about what "personality promotion" was involved with Roosevelt dimes, the more unbelievably stupid reason was, "Why, Roosevelt Dimes, the Chicago Bears football player, of course!" I have NOT made this story up. I wish I could recall the publication source to prove it. Incidents like this have caused suficient public outcry that Prodigy is under investigation, as summed up in the following snippet from , 4/22/91: "FAR FROM A PRODIGY" (Network World, April 15, p.4) Prodigy Services Co. is being investigated for possible criminal or civil violations stemming from its electronic-mail pricing and bulletin board editing policies. Users are complaining about the on-line service's recently established 25-cent price tag for every E-mail message after the first 30 allowed per month; they claim that Prodigy's policy pf deleting or editing controversial or obscene' (since when are Roosevelt dimes either controversial OR obscene?) "messages from bulletin boards violates the First Amendment. (DA Probes BBS Practices at Prodigy, by Barton Crockett)." My own opinion is that your parents would be best off to assert one of our few remaining rights, to just take that Prodigy kit and return it to Sears before they cancel the famous Sears money-bakc guarantee. There are plenty of other places to have both bbs recreation and to use "electronic mail" provided by responsible parties. Even MCIMail has a deal where your e-mail (of moderate length) costs only 25 cents per message, while it reaches a far wider range, including real business. And, oh. Compu$erve's "e-mail" to the outside world is really a port to MCIMail, so why not just open an MCIMail account and buy it direct, and cheaper? All you need to do to help is to get an easy-to-use comms program for their Sears-bought PS/1 (I recommend BOYAN as a very easy program for beginners to use, especially if you install it and enter the dialing directory numbers for them) and introduce them to the world of REAL bbs-ing. In fact, if you get onto a commercial e-mail service and request it of our Moderator, he can get the Digest delivered to DOS, MAC or what-have-you there daily! [Moderator's Note: This is correct. TELECOM Digest can be (and is!) delivered to almost every commercial email service in the world. Copies go to MCI Mail, ATT Mail, Telemail/Sprint Mail, Compuserve, Portal, and many others including the Telebox Mail system in Germany. All you have to do is provide me with a working path to get there. PAT]