kityss@att.uucp> (04/23/91)
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. They received a Prodigy start up kit (well, they bought the darn thing at Sears) and are interested in it. The first question I have involves e-mail. Can Internet users send e-mail to Prodigy users and vice-a-versa? If yes, how is it done? I also need some comparative analysis of Prodigy vs. Compuserve. Do the two offer similar services besides e-mail? Of particular interest to my Dad are the news service, the travel stuff, and weather. I did follow the discussions a while back about Prodigy "sensoring" e-mail (a practice I despise) and was hoping to discover that Compuserve has virtues to recommend it above Prodigy. I would appreciate replies either by e-mail to kityss@ihlpf.att.com or through posts to this group. Pat - I can not ftp the archives from this location. If you could send me the instructions on "alternative e-mail archive access" I could look at back articles discussing Prodigy. Thanks. Arnette Baker AT&T Network Systems kityss@ihlpf.att.com [Moderator's Note: I've sent you the bitftp help file. For others who cannot use ftp at their site, if you wish information about the bitftp method for accessing the archives, send me a note and I will send you a copy of the help file. When using the help file, substitute 'lcs.mit.edu' and 'cd telecom-archives' in the appropriate places. PAT]
Christopher Lott <cml@cs.umd.edu> (04/26/91)
In article <telecom11.303.4@eecs.nwu.edu> Arnette Baker writes: > I am looking for information on Prodigy. > Can Internet users send e-mail to Prodigy users and vice-a-versa? To the best of my knowledge, no. I believe that this IS possible for Compuserve, due to the kindness of Ohio-State's CIS software staff. >I also need some comparative analysis of Prodigy vs. Compuserve. Do >the two offer similar services besides e-mail? Of particular interest Sorry, can't do comparative analysis. But here's a few thoughts on Prodigy. I was offered their free one-month subscription along with free s/w, so I bit. IMHO the best thing about the service is access to SABRE, the airline reservations system from American Airlines. You can check flights, availability, fares, and place reservations. Then you contact a travel agent to charge the ticket. Prodigy has some travel agent support online, but I don't know how good it is. In terms of privacy, it's somewhat invasive WRT credit cards. The SABRE system won't let you in until you supply a credit card number, but it doesn't do much validation; I've heard a bogus number works great. Lots of other offers want you to type in your credit card number; I never did. Just in case you didn't know this, the reason Prodigy is so cheap is that they show an advertisement on nearly every screen. And during a lengthy screen repaint, they very carefully draw the ad first and let you stare at it while the rest of the screen is being redrawn. To date, I have received no junk mail resulting from Prodigy selling their lists. I made sure by deliberately entering my address with a small mistake, and no junk mail has shown up with THAT as the address. However, it was fun requesting freebies, product info, etc. from the advertisers. Got a swell miata poster and some other goodies; nothing really great though. The stock market quote service (and "portfolio tracker") are nice, if you want to follow your securities closely. There's an endless amount of stuff to burn time with. Games, forums, newsy stories, etc. I have Usenet for that already ;-) Forget about using a 1200 baud modem with Prodigy, unless you're VERY patient. Between modem slowness and system delays, it's SLOW with a 1200. Never used email on it; you get a certain number of messages free each month, and then each one costs you $.25 past that free number. Don't know about their privacy policy, but I wouldn't count on ANYTHING. That's all I can think of right now. If I get another free month somehow, I'll sign up again. But *I* sure wouldn't pay for it. Not when I have free access to Usenet! Christopher Lott \/ Dept of Comp Sci, Univ of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742 cml@cs.umd.edu /\ 4122 AV Williams Bldg 301 405-2721 <standard disclaimers> [Moderator's Teaser: If its *privacy* you want, the latest word is Prodigy violates your privacy regularly. In the next issue of the Digest, I'll be printing (what I feel is) a *very explosive* report I received recently from a regular user of that service. Apparently they have no hesitation or compuction against raping your hard drive in the process of getting you established on line. PAT]
"Donald E. Kimberlin" <0004133373@mcimail.com> (04/28/91)
In article (Digest v11, iss303), Arnette P. Baker <ihlpf!kityss@ att.uucp> 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 <Information WEEK>, 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]