E-Mail and Mailing Lists: When The Internet Was A Toll Road

[morgandawn]

How many of us remember the early days of email and mailing lists? When you had to pay for every message you downloaded?  If you were on CompuServe or Genie or AOL, messages within their network were often free – but every message from the “Internet” cost you extra. For example, a single Internet message on CompuServe cost 15 cents. A fan would pay $8.95 a month for the basic service. If you dialed in during business hours, you paid additional connection charges.   As long as it was after hours or on weekends, you paid no connect or online charges.  But each Internet message came  postage due.  The volume of mailing list email could literally nickel and dime your wallet empty.

Example CompuServe charges from 1994

                Read/Download Internet Messages:**
                first 7500 characters            $ .15 (or 25 cents in today’s money)
                additional 2500 characters       $ .05
                 ** If Internet messages are deleted without reading or automatically  
                    deleted by the system after 30 days, no charges are incurred.

                Users on CIS' Standard Pricing Plan ($8.95/mo with no connect charges for basic
                services, including e-mail) are given an electronic mail allowance of $9.00, which includes
                reading/downloading Internet messages)"

 Here is one fan who complained to a public mailing list in 1993 (message has been slightly edited)

 I love to hear from you, but PLEASE address your answers to the [mailing] list and not to me.  I simply cannot afford to pay the transfer charges every time a message is transfered from Internet to [my service provider].

 I can afford to read the [mailing] list three times a week, but if I get too many messages replying to me personally I shall simply have to stop posting.

Fans came up with creative workarounds. You might find a friend who had un-metered email and ask them to download an entire day’s worth of messages and forward it to you as a single message.  That way you could read everything and only pay for one (very long) message. And when replying, you would send all your responses back to the list in one single message.

 When digest email was introduced, the costs came down considerably and you didn’t have to bother your friends. On Virgule-L, one of the list admins ran calculations back in 1994 and here are the numbers (adjusted upwards to today’s dollars). 

In a typical month, a mailing list could generate about 600Kb of traffic.  Assuming one message per day (digest format), that would come to approximately  a total of $21/mo, or an extra $7/mo for those fans already paying the basic monthly charge. Assuming a very chatty month with 1Mb of traffic, the figure would be $32.00/month.

Note that these figures would be *much* more if the mailing list were received on a per-message basis, because each message would incur the 7500 character minimum charge of $0.25 cents, even if the message was much shorter than that.  So, assuming that you saw about 300 messages a month, and that 100 of those are 5000 characters over the 7500 minimum, the charge would be $84.00/month.  On a busy month where you would receive 500+ messages, it would be more like $115/month. 

So there you have it: the cost to subscribe to a single mailing list ranged between $32 -$115/month.

I shared this with a friend and this is what she wrote back: 

“…when people first started getting personal computers, there was all sorts of essays and comments and reactions from fans about how "online wasn't free," that everyone knew print zines cost cold hard cash but buying a computer, paying for modems, being online, ink cartridges, (some even tossed in the cost of their desks and chairs!), as an example of why the fic online wasn't actually "free," that those with computers had to put out a substantial financial outlay (which they did!), and that netfans were actually just as exclusionary regarding access as print fans. 

 But somewhere along the way, those comments completely stopped. No one now says stuff like that anymore. The cost of having computer access in one's home has been absorbed as a general cost of doing business. Today, complaining of those costs would be like complaining about having to turn a light on so you didn't have to squint at a fanwork in the dark.”

 When I attended Escapade, the slash convention the 1990s, the print fan vs net fan debate raged.  Netfans did not fare well in these discussions - net fans were elitists, running away to online places where the average fan could not afford to follow. Netfans treated fanfic as a product instead of a community gift. Net fandom encouraged Instant Gratification Mentality.  But these debates only lasted a few years. Then one year, someone at Escapade asked everyone in the room who did not have a computer to raise their hand. It was about 30% of the room. Three years later the same question was asked and one lone woman raised her hand. And thus we all became netfans. And it was good.

Comments

[sholio]

I'm fascinated to learn that's where mailing list digests came from! I just missed the pay-per-email period, because I got online in 1995 through my university, which was free. (Well, the email was free; the university obviously wasn't. :P) I've always known the digest option was a thing on mailing lists, even today, but if I ever knew the reasons, I'd completely forgotten; I just assumed that for busy people it was more convenient to have all the emails at once rather than have them trickle in one at a time.

[morgandawn]

I think mailing list digests were always an option, but it may have been something that needed to be enabled by the list admin? And of course fans had to know about them and learn how they worked and how they could be useful.

I remember on the early Blake's 7 mailing list, there was a debate (1993?) about whether to offer digests as an option. I'll see if I can find the summary.

BTW, here is a nifty historical note about one of those early mailing lists. The Blake's 7 mailing list digests were made available to anyone on the Internet - no membership needed. Now, they're a great source of historical data. In fact the digests have been publicly available for almost 20 years. They used to offer a searchable web-like interface, but that ended in 2010. Now they're stored in harder to read zip files.

[morgandawn]

OK this is from the Blake's 7 list admin in 1992 shortly after the mailing list was created:

"After several readings of the Perl manual "page" (which is 70 pages long) and muche exeprimenting I now have something which gobbles a mailbox file and creates a digest out of it. Add some cron and mail magic, and suddenly it is possible to get the Blake's 7 mailing list in digest form. Nice, huh?"

and then after the digests were enabled the list admin wrote: "Would it be a good idea to post the digests to rec.arts.sf.tv? (this is the very public USENET)."

In the end they decided to post the digests to a public folder on their server and direct people there.

Still have not found any signs of debate over digests so that may be some other mailing list...like Virgule-L.

edited: yes, it was on VL. We decided to offer digest as an option in Sept 1993. There was at least one objection but I think it was because some of us didn't know digest was an option and you could still get the list message by message. At the time (1993) VL was one of the few mailing lists around that had not yet started to offer digests.

[embroiderama]

This is terribly tangential, but the pay-per-email model still exists--in prison. My boss's brother-in-law is in prison (again) and they have a new program that offers email access "for a cost per message generally less than the cost of postal mail." In prison, it's the early 90s.

I also missed this period of fandom. I got online for the first time in late '96 and got my own computer with AOL in '97, and I think that they went to unlimited minutes not TOO long after I got online. It's interesting that pre-net fans felt that netfans were elitist, considering that very few people had the means/luck to be aware that fanfic existed before the internet. I certainly didn't, and I wish I had.

[morgandawn]

The metering was more for the 'accessible' Internet providers - the ones that catered to people who had little or no computer or net experience. I remember we selected a different type of provider (netcom) which offered a flat rate with unlimited emails - but you had to know a bit of Unix and Pine (or at least be willing to learn). And it turned out to be a good move because when Virgule-L had to leave the university listserv, I was able to run V-L from my netcom account. Netcom offered mailing lists (I had to learn how to set up the mailing list and run it - this was no yahoo group).

When onelist/egroups/yahoo groups appeared, it further democratized mailing lists so that anyone - even those with little computer knowledge - could start and manage their own.

[adair]

I was not aware of these mail costs; most of the people I knew locally had free access through the university. I had it by 1992 and could stay after work and do usenet searches and create a data list for the OED to earn the money to buy my own computer. Then I had free dial-up university access, and sometime, probably in 1995, I paid for my own dial-up earthlink account to get email separate from work. There was no email limit, or at least I never crossed it. Dial-up was cheap but the need for faster access came quickly as web sites went well beyond text. At some point in the late 90s internet access became important; my mother wanted a computer. Fans with little net access were working out deals to get stuff printed for them by people with home computers. I still know one no-computer holdout, but she reads email on her smartphone.