Bad Juno!

Bad Juno!
When I first started an e-mail account with Juno many years ago--the early '90s, I guess--I was pleased with their service and found it quite easy to use.

That began to change in the late '90s. 1st, they started to charge for service, whereas initially they were free. Well, one can't complain too much about having to pay for service.

Then I discovered that I couldn't transfer my mail from one computer to another. When I went to New Orleans for 4 months, I could import the account, but I had no access to the mail I'd left in Paterson or even the addresses! I had to work from scratch. And when I came back north, I had to leave behind whatever was on the computer in New Orleans. Not every convenient, to say the least.

Other than that, things went along OK for a couple of years here in New Rochelle--until the day my primary account was corrupted. Juno was able to restore all the folders--several thousand stored messages--but only into one massive folder, not the several working folders that I had. It took me several weeks to sort them out again.

Then there was another corruption episode, and another. Eventually I lost a fairly large chunk of mail, and I'm still sorting out more than 4,000 messages in a single "restored" folder because I just can't keep up with all the incoming and archival work. (Historians tend to want to save a lot for future reference, and of course some things really do need to be saved for immediate reference when you're running a publishing house, putting out a quarterly magazine, and offering communications service on behalf of a religious congregation.)

I was backing up my accounts, but perhaps not regularly enuf. I was also saving hard copies of correspondence, but not on a nearly regular basis because it is very time consuming.

But after the 2d corruption episode I decided I'd better find another e-mail provider and opened a gmail account. But I wasn't able to import my more than 950 addresses (!) from Juno; at least I wasn't able to figure out how to do it, following gmail's instructions. So eventually I wound up keying all of them in, one by one. That was a slow process...

...until I was directed by the proverbial powers-that-be to shut down my Juno accounts as a cost-saving measure and get to a free provider (like gmail). So I hastened the data entry--and have nearly finished that for both Juno accounts.

Last week I canceled service on one of the Juno accounts, the secondary one. I didn't realize that I would lose all of my saved mail--a couple of thousand messages dealing mainly with the business of running the Salesian Bulletin--would be lost when I did that. Of course I should have heeded earlier advice from Fr. Julian Fox and saved it all immediately as text files. Foolish me thought having a back-up file would suffice. But Juno refuses to restore the old mail.

Never mind that I paid--the Salesians paid!--for all that service, all that mail, and Juno can hardly say that it belongs to them now. Hard to understand why stopping the delivery of mail for the future means one can't have access to one's old mail. Are they just vindictive because we've stopped using their service? One wonders.

So--there you have several reasons why I would not recommend Juno to you as an e-mail service provider!