I was among the first Juno free email subscribers- they sent me a postcard about 12 years ago, promising me free email for life. I thought that was a great deal- I'd have a stable email address even if I changed internet providers. My email address was short and simple, easy for me and others to remember.

On September 27th of 2007, I got home from work, attempted to log in to my juno account - got a message that username/password could not be found. I tried different browsers - nothing worked. I searched Juno's site to find out how to get help. The only option was to pay $1.95/minute for technical support. I feared that someone had logged in as me and changed my password, so I called the technical support number to get help. The technical support representative got all my information and then told me that my account had been cancelled, so she could not help me. She could not tell me why my account had been cancelled. She gave me a website address that would walk me through getting my account restored and also gave me an email address to write to - [email protected] . The website I had already been to, and if you couldn't login, it was worthless. I wrote to the email address and this was their response:

'It has come to our attention that you have been using your Juno account in a way that violates our Service Agreement and Acceptable Use Guidelines. Such abuse of our service is grounds for termination of your membership.'

Since I only login to Juno once a day or so to read my emails, and rarely send emails from it, I found it hard to believe that I could have violated their 'rules' . I asked for specific details, and they would not tell me anything, but gave me the name/address/phone# of the Juno Legal Department.

My guess was that someone was sending SPAM and spoofing my email address - but one would think that Juno would have checked the headers to determine from whence they had been sent.

On October 2, 2007, I tried calling the Juno Legal Department, but got a recording to leave a message and they'd get back to me. That same day I wrote and mailed a letter to them explaining that my Juno email account had been cancelled, I had called their $1.95/minute technical support line, written to the abuse email, but had not gotten specific information about the reason for them cancelling my account. In my letter I told them:

'I am writing to you to get specifics as to why my account was cancelled. Would cancelling my account with no warning have happened if I were a paying Juno customer? I need these answers - if I do not get the answers, I will draw my own conclusions.
I hope to hear from you soon, so that I can decide what further action, if any, to take.'

Well, it is now November, more than 4 weeks after I mailed them the inquiry letter, and they did not respond.

So, I decided I need to take some action.

-I went to the credit union and filed a dispute about the charge for the Juno technical support phone call on my VISA bill- it was amost $12 - I told them that I did not think that making me pay to find out they'd cancelled my juno email account was right. Had they restored the account then and there, I probably would not have filed the dispute.
-and now I am writing this story with two goals in mind: 1. let other Juno email users know that juno can cancel your account at any time without warning, and make you pay for the privilege of finding that out.
2. let Juno Legal department know that they should ignore consumers who have been referred to them.