After almost nine and a half years, I am closing down monkey. I have
enjoyed being useful to people during this time. Monkey was able to
fill a niche especially -- providing dialup, text based access to
email at a time when ISP's were moving away from shell accounts and
towards graphical-only, PPP/SLIP dialins. However, many friends of
mine (dear users) still had 286's or 386's or older macintoshes, none
of which came with ppp at the operating system level.
I also have seen the technical expertise and level of service from
ISP's in general go downhill rapidly (click for my
story). That and other things have made it somewhat
stressful.
Don't get me wrong, I have enjoyed providing what I hope has been a
useful service. However, I don't have the time to provide what I
consider a reasonable level of service for you, my valued
Users. Please read the history of
monkey for further details.
When does this happen? as of this writing (May 11, 2000) I don't
really know. I wish I had all the answers before coming to you, but I
don't. I've chosen to make you all aware of what is going on first so
that you have the most time available to look for alternative things.
I want to provide a good amount of time for people to get email
addresses changed over, and so on. So I want to provide aliasing for
a period of time. Please tell me as soon as you no longer need
the alias on monkey. I will announce how long aliasing will be
available for.
I recommend that you look for another account, and/or use that of
your ISP. Remember to let me know problems@monkey.sbay.org
as soon as you have another address so I can begin to forward mails
there
Once you
have another account, please let me know by mailing
<problems@monkey.sbay.org> and I will begin directing mail there.
I don't know how long I will provide alias service. I haven't
decidedx what will replace monkey. I will let you know as soon as I
know this. It has been my pleasure to provide this service.
Those of you who think you have substantial mailboxes/inboxes on
monkey, and of course files, please contact me
about copying those files off.
Jeff Taylor from ITSG offers email, web hosting, dns, and other services. E-Mail info@itsg.net and tell them you're
a monkey refugee.
Free E-Mail Alternatives :
myownemail.com, ... - Good space for E-Mail + 50mb of space.
hotmail.com - Popular web-based free E-Mail service.
iname.com, ... - "Free Private, Personalized, Permanent E-Mail Accounts".
my.yahoo.com - Free yahoo.com
E-Mail, news, and more.
www.mailjol.com - Free email
access in several Indian languages
mail.com, ... - "The Internet
messaging specialists"
bigfoot.com - Hmm, their
server wasn't accepting connections when I tried it. Supposed to have
good spam blocking services.
netscape.com
- Part of Netscape's NetCenter.
pobox.com - Not free, but 30
day trial is available
("..." means there are multiple choices available about
what the @domain is.)
Once again I want to thank all of you for your support and patronage
throughout the years. -- Steven R. Loomis
problems@monkey.sbay.org
ISP's going downhill? Take my experience.. TLG was
great. When Best bought them, things got a little shaky. I still
don't think TLG was ever fully merged into Best. I got disconnected a
lot more, and every once in a while someone had to drive up to SF "to
reboot the TLG authentication server". Ick. Verio has been even
worse. Their staff are OK to deal with, I don't think it's their
fault personally that it takes 15 minutes to identify me and locate my
TWO accounts in their database. April 4th of 2000, someone in their
training center cancelled the account that logs into the net.. without
even notifying me. But they set it to take effect the next billing
cycle. This happened May 1st, late at night. it took all of the next
day (May 2nd) to first reach someone without being disconnected by
their phone tree, and then to find out what the problem was (their
error). However, late at night, they have no authorization to fix the
account because Accounting requested it! Well, next morning,
Accounting found and fixed the problem. But, the fix didn't take
place until hours later. Basically, the employees aren't authorized
to serve customers. On a previous incident, there was reluctance to
page the person with the root password because it was late at night.
Well, that's what 24 hour service is about. And this is after paying
$245 a month for four and a half years. I couldn't get through to
faster service than the generic hour-long wait on the phone..
(back to the top)
Last update: May 11, 2000
|
