>From: "Lee Bell" leebell@ix.netcom.com

>For some reason, AOL posts that
>are forwarded to me come as attachments rather than in the body of the
>message, making it hard for my reader to get to them.

AOL treats e-mail forwards as attachment too. If you think it's inconvenient
for the receiver, consider that as an attachment it's no longer readily
accessible to the sender either. That's a pain if you want to edit it, but
cutting and pasting is probably better than simply forwarding a message anyway.

>biggest problem I have with them
>is that they make it so easy to remain contrained without knowing that you
>have been.

Part of AOL's strategy has always been to make it easy to use, but a bigger
part of their strategy seems to be to keep people within AOL turf. Some
companies sell internet access, but AOL is trying to sell their customers to
other companies (through links and other marketing strategies); offering access
is just their tool for bringing in more people to sell. The more I learn about
AOL the more I hate them. Unfortunately my wife doesn't want to dump it, so
here I am. I do find the newsreader convenient, whcih is why I post from AOL.
Most of the other stuff i do online is strictly through my dial up provider.

>This seems to attract those used to being constrained who, quite
>frankly, sometimes don't fit well in a freewheeling group like this one.

Unfortunately AOL censors their message boards (I actually got an official
e-mail and had a post deleted once for calling some guy a moron when he
basically asked where to go look at naked people on St Martin) and I think that
makes for a rude awakening when some people venture out into the real world.


Steve

The above can be construed as personal opinion in the absence of a reasonable
belief that it was intended as a statement of fact. Or it might just be to