It depends on the the methodology you use to access the net.  Some ISP's
charge an hourly on-line fee.  Some commercial net services charge for email
in excess of a given number of messages (CI$ used to although this is
diminished under the new pricing and I thought AOL did as well).  And, if you
access the newsgroups through a USENET reader (rather than getting all
messages as email) which is the most convenient way to access the net for most
of us, CI$, MSN and most ISP's will count that against your on-line time.

While many museum list members reach the "cloud" with access through their own
servers, a university server for which they may not pay, etc., the addresses
and routing paths of the messages I've seen lead me to think that many readers
are, like Patriots Point, paying an hourly fee.  Ours is nominal thanks to an
aggressive State contract, but many people may be paying as much as $2.95 an
hour.


In article <[log in to unmask]>,
   Mindy Lehrman Cameron <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>E. L. Wimett wrote that some people have to pay to read email.  Is that so?
> I do a flashsession to retrieve my mail (usually takes a minute or less) and
>then read it off line.  I also compose off line and use flashsessions to
>send.  I pay for basic service, but email hasn't yet added to that.
>-Mindy Lehrman Cameron
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