response 1 of 30:

Mar 22 17:24 UTC 2002

My first ISP. I forget which one it was, this was ages ago. It may not even
be around, but at the time, it was a competitor with then-nascent AOL. Anyway,
the "30 day free trial" asked for a credit card number. I gave one, then
cancelled after two weeks. The monthly charge started appearing on my bill.
I was told (1) that I would not have been asked for a credit card for the free
trial, and (2) that I had not cancelled. About half an hour of yelling later,
the credit card charges were refunded.
 
(I didn't actually NEED an ISP at the time, because I was at MSU and could
use local dial-ups and my school account.)

response 3 of 30:

Mar 22 17:37 UTC 2002

A $1 charge is a pretty common way to verify that a card is valid.  
They were probably sorting out which of the numbers they had were good, 
in preparation for using them for large purchases later.  When you use 
a credit card as a deposit for something, it's pretty common for a $1 
charge to be placed on it to check that it's valid, as well.  
Blockbuster used to do it that way -- they'd make a $1 charge, then 
credit it back.

response 5 of 30:

Mar 22 18:32 UTC 2002

That's a good question.  I don't know.

response 7 of 30:

Mar 22 18:38 UTC 2002

That's what the avalonmicro people might have been indicating in using
the term "hackers". But then avalonmicro would be receiving the $1
charges, which they deny. 

response 9 of 30:

Mar 22 19:54 UTC 2002

We were using TIR.  Earthlink bought them out.  Our monthly rate went up from
$14.95 to $19.95 without our being notified that there was a buy out or a rate
increase.  We switched to cable modem in July.  Notified Earthlink in
September to cancel the service.  We are still being charged the monthly fee.
STeve is going to make one more call to them and threaten action if they:
1) don't quit charging
2) refund the charges that were taken from our account since he notified them
the first time.

We will probably also have the card cancelled and a new one issued.  What a
pain.  We will then have to notified the different companies that do an
automatic monthly charge that the # has changed.

response 11 of 30:

Mar 22 22:13 UTC 2002

When Earthlink bought out Onemain which bought out TIR, I had paid for 15
months at $7.  Earthlink, at the end of 12 months, started to bill me
$27/month.  I complained loudly enough, to them and to the Michigan Attorney
General, that I got this amount refunded.  (They also goofed and gave me a
free month which I did not use - I switched to an ISP where the email worked).
Earthlink claimed they had sent out an email notice that, if we did not
specifically answer it, we would be liable to being billed at their new rate.
MI did not tell me if that was legal, Earthlink claimed it was.  Eventually
they decided to switch from the $27 to the $19 service, explaining that the
$27 service was the closest approximation to Onemain's service because the
latter had 10 email accounts and theirs had 11.  The $19 service had 8
accounts.  I was using zero of these as they could not manage to figure out
why my email was not working for the one account I knew about.  TIR I think
had 5, maybe 3 accounts.  

response 13 of 30:

Mar 23 02:31 UTC 2002

You might want to confirm with your credit card company *but* anyone
that has set up an automatic charge to your credit company and continues
to bill the old number *EVEN AFTER* you cancel that number and get a 
new one will typically cause a bill to be sent to you referencing the
old credit card number, often on the same statement.  
'Thats the way the system works' is the response on the part of many
credit card companies.  This has only happened to me once a couple
years ago and it took months of effort to stop and I never did get
a credit for the billed amounts which I had paid.  Whats-her-name
has had this happen to her for 18-months or so in a similar situation
and cost her thousands so far and is still ongoing.  

As a rule, never ever voluntarily allow an automatic debit to be
periodically issued by another party against your account (be it credit
or otherwise).  Always ALWAYS be the initiator of a financial
transaction.  Always look at the statement for every account and know
exactly what each and every charge is.  

response 15 of 30:

Mar 23 04:52 UTC 2002

Good luck and let us know how it goes.

response 17 of 30:

Mar 25 12:49 UTC 2002

Ever heard of a virus attacking a machine from UNIX based email?

I do not expect, want, or enjoy graphics or other such things in email.  Have
seen very little to warrant them.  Most web based email that I get is spam.
I expect mail to be informative, not eye candy.  For I candy, I surf the web.

Web based mail also uses much more bandwidth.  On mails that I get with both
a text and an html section the whole thing can 300+ lines.  About 20-30 of
those lines are the text section.  The rest is the html.

response 19 of 30:

Mar 25 17:37 UTC 2002

Re #17:  I call that "HTML email" and think of "web-based email" as
email read via a web-browser -- hotmail.com, for example, provides
web-based email.  I agree that HTML email is mostly a waste of time
and bandwidth, but web-based email in the latter sense is useful.

response 21 of 30:

Mar 25 18:04 UTC 2002

HTML mail is email that comes in HTML code so you can have all the 
spiffy graphics, fonts, etc that you can have on a web page. I have 
never really needed my email to be that fancy though. 

response 23 of 30:

Mar 25 18:10 UTC 2002

I'm always telling correspondents to turn off their HTML option. It
is on my default in OE. Not only is it a waste of time and bandwidth,
but it completely screws up messages sent to page users.