Juno Online Services

Juno client software icon

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.

History

Juno was founded in May 1996 by Charles Ardai, with equity capital provided by the D.E. Shaw Group. In August 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 by dial-up. 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. [cite web
url=http://account.juno.com/s/landing?action=viewProduct&productId=free&group=iso-standard-plus-commitment
title=Product Information
publisher=Juno
accessdate=2007-01-15]

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.

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.

Proprietary client

The client software was updated many times in the late 1990s. Version 1.49 was final for Windows 3.1, except for a date problem that was fixed in version 1.51. Versions 4.0.11 and 5.0.33 were final for Windows 95 and later. Version 4 had attachments and a spell checker, and displayed fonts and colors. For old messages, it had storage folders, each stored in a separate file containing up to 1000 messages.

Version 5 added an ineffective integral twit/spam filter and the ability to write messages in chosen fonts and colors with inline images. It stored its old messages in a different format, with one large file for all messages. When disk free space was not several times larger than the message file, it often suffered "folder collapse" in which all messages returned to the "Inbox" or disappeared.

No version was made to use third party utilities to scan for viruses, clean out E-mail spam, etc, and few third party utilities were made that could do anything with the proprietary message storage format. The company opened a spamdesk to help screen spam at the servers.

As of December 1, 2004, use of an e-mail client such as the Juno client, Microsoft Outlook Express, or Eudora is no longer free. Users who wish to use an e-mail client instead of Juno's web-based e-mail interface must either pay for Juno Platinum or Juno Megamail. [cite web
url=http://www.juno.com/support/faq/email-changes.html
title=FAQ - Email Policy Changes
publisher=Juno Support
accessdate=2007-01-15]

The Juno client software version 5.0 build 33 would not work with Internet Explorer 7. [cite web
url=http://www.freedomlist.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=24686
title=Juno and Internet Explorer 7 Beta - Potential Issues
author=Juno Member Services
date=2006-02-03
accessdate=2007-01-15] However, by the time Microsoft released the final version of IE7, Juno had released Juno 5.0 build 49, which resolves the issues with IE7 and makes it compatible with Windows Vista. [cite web
url=http://my.juno.com/s/download
title=Download the software
publisher=Juno
accessdate=2007-01-15] The proprietary mailers were only slightly supported in the 21st century, and users were expected to use POP3 standard mail clients.

Juno Turbo

Juno has released (along with NetZero) a service that purports to make the internet faster. The only noticeable change is the ability to display pictures at lower resolutions, thereby speeding up page loads.

Complaints

Juno's offline mail reader version 5.0 does not provide an effective method to weed out spam after downloading it. Downloaded email can be weeded out individually by exact email address matches; there are no wildcards, boolean exclusion-filters or routing features. Earlier versions of the proprietary client have this same limitation. However, Juno's Spamdesk feature filters spam at the server, thus minimizing the amount of spam received by the Juno client.

Exporting e-mails and addresses

While the Juno client software can back up e-mails and addresses, it does not support exporting these to other clients, nor do other clients support importing from Juno. To do this, users must use third party applications to convert and export the data, principally [http://www.ephemeraleuphoria.com/media/juno5bdb.html juno5bdb] for messages (which Juno stores in a Berkeley DB), and [http://mysite.verizon.net/zakharin/software/Dawn/ Dawn] for addresses.

Development centers

Juno also has an offshore development center at Hyderabad, India. The name of the center has been changed recently to United Online Services Development India Pvt. Ltd.

ee also

*United Online
*NetZero

External links

* [http://www.juno.com/ Juno] - Company website
* [http://email.wikia.com/wiki/Juno_Email_Clients Juno Email Clients] - Information about how to extract mail and addresses from several versions of the Juno email client to other clients
* [http://www.freelists.org/archives/juno_accmail/ juno_accmail] - Discussion list for Juno users

References