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On Thu, 13 Apr 1995 ProJo@aol.com wrote:

> On 4/13, smclaugh@gate.globalx.net wrote:
> 
> >It's nice to see Prodigy bragging about its Internet prowess compared to
> >other outernets. But the comparison has a big hole in it -- there was no
> >direct Internet service provider in the competition. 

> >One test they also didn't seem to include was sending attachments by 
> >e-mail. I don't know about Prodigy, but I know from experience I can't 
> >send an attachment by e-mail to Compuserve or AOL. Attachments are easily 
> >the best feature of Internet e-mail.
There were LOTS of things not compared, but we can just recognize that 
this was a great way for all three vendors to show "We do Internet"
and maintain subscriber base.

> I don't sense that this was a "big hole"... I think the point was to compare
> the Internet capabilities of commercial online services. Clearly, any
> Internet service provider can provide access to the Internet better than
> Prodigy/AOL/CompuServe can. What Internet World magazine was trying to do was
> measure how far the commercial services have come in offering not only their
> own proprietary services, but also connecting to the Internet. True, they
No, what they were doing was making a big production that made it appear 
to the Naive User (Manager, Executive...) that you could get ALL the 
power of INTERNET through their dial-up service.

Compuserve just announced "real" slip/ppp connectivity.  They are the 
only ones of the "Big 3" that have replaced/upgraded the X.25 pads with
slip/ppp aware software/pads.  Slight differnces in forwarding characters 
cause Slip->PAD->X25 links to have horrible delays.  A 14.4 kb link can 
be slowed to an effective rate of 2400 baud.  New pads can use the 7F 
framing characters of PPP as forwarding characters.  The alternative is 
to use "Pink Slip" or to replace the pads with Unix Terminal Servers 
which can support Text or PPP through the X.25 link.

> were not comparing Prodigy's ability to access the Internet with Netcom's,
> but nor were they comparing Netcom's non-existent internal databases, content
> areas, chat features, bulletin boards with Prodigy's (and AOL's, and
> CompuServe's) substantial content offerings. 

The main thing you can do on the P,A,C services is SPEND MONEY.  There 
are ways to spend money on the Internet as well, but Internet "Banks" 
only support a small subset of the servers on the net.  A Netscape Server 
costs $25,000 plus Hardware.  An httpd server with source code (required 
to add 3rd party authentication) can be built for under $500 using surplus
hardware (80386 boxes are getting very cheap).

> As far as attachments are concerned, I agree that it's a pain that I can't
> send an attachment from one commercial service to another. I frequently need
> to send Excel or AmiPro files and so I have to make sure that I send it from
> and to Prodigy accounts, or from and to CompuServe accounts, or from and to
> America Online accounts.
As stated before, this is the difference between "forwarded e-mail" and 
"Real Internet Email".

> One question I have: when you say attachments are
> easily the best feature of Internet e-mail, I thought that I have to decode
> and encode any non-ascii attachment if I want to send it over the Internet,
> right?

Not exactly, most mailers support the "Multimedia Internet Mail 
Extensions" (MIME) protocol.  With Eudora, you just "drag and drop" your 
attachment.  Others will prompt you for a file name.  The decode is about
as easy.  You select the message (or messages) and selet the 
read-attachment option.  All of the encoding/decoding is done "under the 
covers".  You can attach almost anything.
MIME is another gift from GPL (the pine mailer).

> That is inadequate for my needs because many (most) of my recipients
> don't know anything about uuencoding.
If you both have slip access, you don't have to.

> I don't have to fool with such nonsense
> on the commercial online services, as long as I am sending to a recipient on
> the same service.
This is because each service uses a proprietary protocol.  Since they 
only support SMTP headers and batch mode retrieval, they only support a 
subset of E-Mail.

	Rex Ballard


From rballard@cnj.digex.net Tue Apr 25 01:23:42 1995
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