Juno client software iconThis article is about an Internet service provider. For other uses of the term Juno see Juno.

Juno is an Internet service provider based in the United States. It is a subsidiary of United Online, that 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 episodically 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.

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.

The Juno client software version 5.0 build 33 would not work with Internet Explorer 7. 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. 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. Most users use the Spamdesk feature, or otherwise use the program in the ordinary way,thereforerarely download spam and need not weed it out. Earlier versions of the proprietary client have no internal anti-spam feature at all, and work as well in this regard.

Exporting e-mails

While the Juno client software can back up e-mails, it does not support exporting e-mails to other clients, so users have to use third party applications, principally juno5dbd, to export messages.