Re: grassroots alternative to easymail?

[bob@contact.omen.com.au (Bob Ogden)]

How about approaching some of the local ISPs. I know here in Perth there
are Email only accounts available from some and that they're pretty
community minded on the whole. It should be an easy matter to arrange a
server box at the ISPs offices and piggyback off their modem pool. Propose
it to the ISP as a small revenue stream that a/ could be upgraded to a
full account in the future b/ is _good_  publicity c/ would cost then
relatively little (this is assuming ComputerBank is doing the support ) 

UUCP would be my choice here. It'd allow you to offer a (small) choice of
news groups as well as Email ( assign a point score to each group based on
volume and give each user X points to play with)  and even store and
forward FTP if you wanted to go that far.



In <199903230639.OAA30213@digital.linux.org.au>, on 23/Mar/99 
   at 05:39 PM,(+1100 GMT)
Ken Yap <ken@nhj.nlc.net.au> said:

> Well it looks like Telstra (or their contracted 3rd party developers)
> don't want to make the protocol public. I've heard a suggestion that
> it's because people could then write a client that didn't display ads.

> What if Computerbank were to implement a similar service for our
> clients, i.e. an email only, time and bandwidth limited, dialin service.
> The POP and SMTP servers would have to be made to limit resources and
> login time. Or it could be done over UUCP as someone suggested. This way
> there would be few issues with client-modem ratio as our clients would
> be paying per dialin; there would be disincentive to overuse the
> service. Maybe a small fee like $10 per quarter would cover phone line
> rental, equipment, and other costs.

> When they like email, they can then graduate to registering for a
> regular ISP account from any of the usual suspects.


-- 
/-- Bob Ogden  bob@contact.omen.com.au --------------/
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