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000075_news@watsun.cc.columbia.edu _Thu May 20 10:51:57 1999.msg
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From: fdc@watsun.cc.columbia.edu (Frank da Cruz)
Subject: Re: Email access via Kermit?
Date: 20 May 1999 14:22:19 GMT
Organization: Columbia University
Message-ID: <7i15qr$2q1$1@newsmaster.cc.columbia.edu>
To: kermit.misc@watsun.cc.columbia.edu
In article <37440CFE.DF85D473@email.hsc.vcu.edu>,
Jim Agnew <agnew@email.hsc.vcu.edu> wrote:
: Marietta L. Nelson wrote:
: >
: > I have been happily accessing email via my .gov account for many
: > years, but since I have recently retired, I am about to lose this
: > text-based access.
: >
: > I have a commercial account, but it relies on NETSCAPE, which
: > frequently bombs out on me.
: >
: > Is there ANY email provider out there which allows me to just
: > dial up via good old Kermit? If it matters, I live in Maryland.
: >
: > Thanks, I hope.
: >
: > reflib@nist.gov (Marietta Nelson--when my commercial account is
: > working, I'm: benzonia@bellatlantic.net)
:
: I suspect that your real goal is for free email access..
:
: Juno.com, hotmail.com are two examples. Having downloaded Juno, you can
: get textmode email for free, with the only drag of seeing adverts all
: the time.
:
: Frankly, I don't know about anything for Kermit. I'd contact the
: colleges and universities around you to see if they have free accounts
: for the public. i suspect if you know any sysadmins they may give you
: an account as long as you promise to behave!!! ;-)
:
Text-mode "shell accounts" are offered by increasingly few ISPs, which is a
shame for the old timers who know how to use a UNIX shell and prefer it over
GUIs. In a way, it is also a shame for the newcomers, since they are stuck
with GUI email clients that might be pretty to look at, but are also
probably the most frequent entree of viruses and other hostile invaders to
your PC. (Here at Columbia U, those who use MM or Pine for e-mail rather
than Exchange and friends happily went on about their business while everybody
else suffered through the Chernobyl virus a few weeks ago.)
GUI email clients also promote all sorts of antisocial behavior, often without
the knowledge of the user, e.g. sending email to all and sundry in Microsoft
Word format (even though the recipient might be on Linux, VMS, VM/CMS, etc),
as well as numerous other formats and encodings -- HTML, HQX, Quoted
Printable, etc -- that are often not understood by the recipient's mail
client. This is especially annoying when the message was just plain ASCII
text to begin with ("Could you PLEASE resend your message as plain text?"
... "But I DID send it as plain text!" ...)
I think I remember hearing about lists of "text-friendly" ISPs, but I don't
recall the exact reference. Maybe somebody out there can point to the info?
Of course, once you have that shell account, you'll still be receiving more
and more email in Word format. But then you can use Kermit to download it
to your PC and decode it after you have had a chance to look at who it's from
and satisfy yourself it's not a mail bomb :-)
- Frank