what is aol email address?

Question

Kristen Aviles · Answer

But is it really that bad?

America Online, as it was originally called, launched in early 1991 as one of the first popular graphical dial-up services. It wasn’t the first; that honor belonged to Prodigy, which probably deserves its own article at some point.

America Online didn’t run on Windows. Back then, that would have made it impossible for most people to use it, because their computers wouldn’t handle it. It ran on a platform called GeoWorks, which was a lot like Windows, but it could run on pretty much any computer of the day.

AOL, as it was quickly nicknamed, became popular just by sheer force of will. The company blanketed the market with floppy disks with their software pre-installed. These were sent by mail.

Good heavens, that makes me feel old.

AOL sent so many disks out, that I probably didn’t actually buy blank disks for about five years. I wasn’t the only one, I’m sure.

Believe it or not, there was a time when AOL could do no wrong. The company soared in the 1990s, buying out tech companies left and right, and eventually buying Time Warner (which was later sold to AT&T.) At one time it seemed foolish to even compete against them. Yet, as early as the 2000s, AOL users began to be scorned by the more tech-forward internet community. AOL was a walled garden full of dial-up users and the future was more about DSL, fiber, and wireless.

AOL never grew past its early-2000’s glory days, and it slowly sold off its acquisitions until the company itself was bought by Verizon in 2015. But, the story didn’t end there.

Today, AOL is a provider of free email services, as they continue to serve a fairly large community. In addition to supplying email to AOL customers, they also service Yahoo, Compuserve, Verizon, and some Frontier emails. Surprisingly, they also still offer dialup.

It took some digging and a couple of actual phone calls, but it turns out you can still get AOL dialup for about $80/year. The company doesn’t want to say how many people actually use that service. There’s also no real understanding of how they can maintain a network of dial-up connections.

It turns out I still actually have an email address administered by AOL, left over from a former internet provider. I hadn’t logged onto it in years, but it was still there. Honestly, it’s not the most modern-looking webmail experience, but it worked. Surprisingly, the account had been managed fairly well, spam-wise; there were tens of thousands of spam emails in the junk box but very few in the main inbox. Most of the emails there were unsolicited, but they were from companies I’d given my address to at one point.

As far as basic email services, it was actually pretty functional. And, you get an aggregated home page with stories of the day, just like you used to with Yahoo way back when. I didn’t find it comforting, but I imagine there are people who would.

I think it’s time to end the stigma of the AOL email address. So what, I say. So you have an address @aol.com. You’re still going down the same internet pathways as everyone else. You’re probably using that address because your friends have had it for decades and because after all these years there’s STILL not a great way to send out “change of address” messages for email accounts you don’t want to keep.

Shakeela Mathur · Answer

AOL Mail (stylized as Aol Mail.) is a free web-based email service provided by AOL, a division of Yahoo! Inc.

AOL Mail has the following features available:

If an AOL Mail account is inactive for 90 days, it may become deactivated, at which point any emails sent to it may not be delivered and may be returned to sender. After 180 days of inactivity, the account may be deleted.[8]

In 1993, both America Online (AOL) and Delphi started connecting their proprietary e-mail services to the Internet.[9]

As of October 1997, AOL Mail was the world's largest e-mail provider, with around 9 million subscribers[10] (identical with the number of AOL subscribers).[11]

In 1997, AOL launched NetMail, a web-based version of its e-mail service. It was initially criticized for only working on Internet Explorer, but a later Java-written version ensured compatibility with Netscape Navigator.[12] The service was renamed AOL Mail on the Web in December 1999.[13]

In January 2001, an e-mail alert service for text-based digital cellphones and pagers was launched.[14]

In 2004, AOL tested a new free webmail service for the public, without the need of customers subscribing to AOL. This was done in an effort to compete better against MSN Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail and Gmail.[15] The service launched in May 2005 under the name AIM Mail, with 2 gigabytes of mail storage and tightly integrated with AOL Instant Messenger (AIM). It is based on technology from MailBlocks, which AOL acquired in 2004.[16]

From August 2006, AOL became entirely free of charge for broadband users.[17][18] The same month, Netscape Mail was migrated to AIM Mail.[19]

In November 2010, AOL released Project Phoenix, an email application program that features a Quick Bar where emails, text messages, and AOL Instant Messenger messages can be sent from one area. It also lets people add up to five accounts into it.[20] In 2012, AOL released the Alto Mail software.

As of July 2012, there were 24 million AOL Mail users.[21] By 2021, the number of paying users had dropped to 1.5 million. [22]

On March 16, 2017, Verizon, which had acquired AOL in 2015, announced that it would discontinue its in-house email services for internet subscribers, and migrate all customers to AOL Mail.[23]

Khushboo jfnfru · Answer