Juno Online Services
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Juno is an Internet service provider based in the United States. It is a subsidiary of United Online, which also owns NetZero and Bluelight Internet Services.
Juno was founded in May 1995 by Charles Ardai, with equity capital provided by the D.E. Shaw Group. In April 1996, it began a free e-mail service–a customer would install the proprietary Juno client which would allow them to send and receive email of about 35 kilobytes in size. Version 1 did not offer attachments or other features. The user could write emails with the Juno client and would periodically sign in. Upon doing so, the Juno client would upload any emails the user had written, download any new incoming emails in the online mailbox, and download targeted advertisements, which were displayed in the client. "QWK" and similar less automated offline readers had been used for years by BBSes to save phone line connect time.
In June 1998, Juno expanded its service to offer premium support for paying subscribers, and added the ability to not only use email, but browse the web. In December 1999, Juno began to offer the same service (minus technical support) for free, provided the user ran the Juno client, which displayed a bar containing advertisements for the majority of the time that the user was online. Juno later placed limits on how much its free internet service could be used in a month. Free service is currently limited to a maximum of 10 hours per month. [1]
With the collapse of the turn of the century Dot-com bubble, advertising revenues declined and the company shifted emphasis to offering discount Web and mail services similar to large ISPs, but at half the price. The client software had been updated many times. Version 1.51 was final for Windows 3.1, and versions 4.0.11 and 5.0.33 final for Windows 95 and later. Version 4 had attachments and a spell checker and displayed fonts and colors. Version 5 added an ineffective integral twit/spam filter and the ability to write messages in one's own fonts and colors with inline images. It stored its old messages in a different format. No version was made to use third party utilities to scan for viruses, clean out spam, etc. The company opened a spamdesk to help screen spam at the servers. Use of the proprietary client or standard POP3 clients such as MS Outlook Express and Mozilla Thunderbird is no longer free, but costs $10 per year. Free and paid accounts can still be accessed via Webmail.
Juno stock began trading on NASDAQ in May 1999, under the symbol JWEB. In June 2001, Juno and NetZero announced a merger. By September 2001, the two companies were merged into United Online and both JWEB and NZRO were delisted.
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[edit] Juno Turbo
Juno has released (along with NetZero) a service that purports to make the internet faster. The only noticeable change, is the ablilty to display pictures at lower resolutions, thereby speeding up page loads.
[edit] Complaints
Juno's "5.0" offline mail reader is designed in such a way as to make it impossible for one to weed out spam after downloading it. Downloaded Email can only be weeded out individually by exact email address matches, there is no wildcards nor any boolean exclusion-filters nor any routing features, this means that Juno and their affiliates can freely spam their customers regardless of what their customers do. Making the service utterly useless once the spammers find the victims' email addresses, except for those who use the spamdesk feature or otherwise use the program in the ordinary way and thus don't download spam. Earlier versions of the proprietary client have no internal antispam feature at all, and work as well in this regard.
