This information will end up in my book, but it's worth mentioning, since it may be of use to you now.
AOL now splits long Internet email messages. In the past the America Online gateway software truncated incoming files at 27K, which put a damper on receiving long text files like TidBITS and BinHexed programs. I tested the splitting by sending myself a test issue of TidBITS and found that it came out broken into three chunks, the first two about 15K long and the third only 1K long. This isn't quite ideal, but we can't argue with progress, I suppose, and with this new feature, AOL's Internet gateway becomes significantly more useful.
Prodigy's Internet gateway won't come cheaply. Jeff Needleman <needje@msen.com> clarified the terms of the current gateway - 15 cents for each 3,000 character block received. No word on the cost to send email through the gateway yet. Jeff said the gateway is in alpha testing, so only a few authorized users can receive mail through it now. I think the cost will have to come down for the gateway to be of serious utility to Prodigy users. If you assume an issue of TidBITS is 30,000 characters, it would cost $1.50 to receive an issue on Prodigy from our Internet mailing list. That's expensive. The Prodigy gateway will have a 60K limit on incoming messages, which will prevent users from requesting large programs from mailservers, even if the cost doesn't.
GEnie opened up its Internet email gateway to all of its users as of 01-Jul-93. Previously, GEnie users had to sign up and pay more to receive Internet email. If you wish to send someone on GEnie email from the Internet, address it to:
username@genie.geis.com
where the username is the person's GEnie username. To send email from GEnie to the Internet, the GEnie user must, much like AppleLink, append @inet# to the Internet address. So my address from GEnie would be <ace@tidbits.com@inet#>. The only cost is for the connect time, and GEnie recently revamped its rates to be more like America Online's rate structure (OK, I don't know who started it, but they're similar now). GEnie costs $8.95 per month with four free hours each month. After those four free hours, users pay $3 per hour in connect time, except in a few free administrative areas. Thanks to <van@cup.portal.com> for the details.