While dumping the
alt.cellular,alt.cellular.attws,alt.cellular.t-mobile,alt.cellular.verizon,alt.cellular.sprintpcs
bit bucket, I heard Todd Allcock say:

> "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.)

Ok, thanks for the comprehensive comparison, Todd. I haven't looked at
AOL in years, and primarily just use GMail to route my own domain
addresses through their excellent spam filters. I haven't run into any
problems using GMail on my V3m, but since I typically only access it to
find something in my archives, I don't really exercise all the options
very much.

--
Dutch