"Dutch" <buryit@blackholespam.net> wrote in message
news:1whtre4pguhid$.dlg@blackholespam.net...
>> Actually AOL IS still around and has completely reinvented themselves,
>> after being beat up pretty good by consumers' general shift from dial-up
>> to
>> broadband. They're now, IMHO, the best free e-mail provider around,
>> (including the guys like Yahoo, GMail, etc.) They offer completely free
>> standard IMAP accounts, usable with standard e-mail clients like Outlook,
>> which works great on mobile devices.
> [...]
>
> What do they offer that GMail doesn't? The Sprint email client works
> just fine with GMail and most other standard IMAP or POP accounts.


GMail's fine too- I've got nothing against it, except that they came very
late to the party. AOL has supported IMAP since 2003- a lot longer than
GMail's been around and certainly a lot longer than they've supported IMAP.
In addition, GMail's POP and IMAP protocol is non-standard, and a little
flakey with some mobile devices- certainly not unusable, but requires a
little more TLC, particularly on WinMo devices. Read e-mails move out of
the IMAP Inbox (and into an "All Mail" subfolder.) GMail's POP is an
absolute mess as far as incompatibility with the standard (retrieved e-mail
stays on the server regardless of your "remove from server" settings, for
example.)

AOL's IMAP implementation is far more standard, (but not without it's own
quirks- you can't create folders in the top level- only as subfolders, and
you can't move messages from other accounts into the AOL inbox for storage.)

In my case, AOL's recent changes worked great for me- I've had my same
e-mail addresses (in my case, AOL) for as long as I've used e-mail- over
fifteen years (how many people can say that?), and dumped AOL's overpriced
dial-up plans for their $5/month limited web access (but unlimited e-mail)
plan years ago even before they first started using IMAP. (Prior to that I
was using a 3rd-party solution called AOL2POP to convert AOL's proprietary
e-mail protocol to POP3, allowing use of Outlook or other e-mail clients
instead of AOL's Web-for-Dummies software.) Dropping the $5/month fee to
free over a year ago was just icing on the cake. Their webmail interface is
ad-supported like Google's, but the IMAP e-mail is ad-free (also like
Google.)