Slashdot Mirror
Time Warner Finds AOL Email Inadequate
DragonMagic writes "MSNBC.com carries this article describing the woes at many of Time Warner's companies after AOL's merger, where the internet giant tried to migrate them all to AOL's email services. From crashing software and attachment limits, to missing and misdirected mail, companies such as Time Magazine had to go so far as to have hard copies rushed before deadlines by cab! Plans are now to retreat from this forced migration and return to the services previously held by each company."
Obviously the person who sent out that decree has either a. never used aol mail, or b. never used email in a corporate environment.
Obviously the person who wrote the above didn't even bother to understand the situation. From the particular article referenced in the Slashdot "story":
Emphasis mine, smartass.
Uh.. it's a WSJ article.
It says so right at the top.
MSNBC generally carries Wire stories.
good kneejerking, though.
When I got my first computer, I signed up for AOL because one of my friends had it and it was the only ISP I had heard of. (This was about five years ago, I was 17, so cut me some slack.:)
I can honestly say that of all the things that eventually irritated me about AOL, the mail has to be the absolute worst. I don't know if they'll allow you to download it with a seperate program now, but when I had it you had to get the mail in the provided portion of the AOL...um... desktop? I'm not sure what to call it, since it took up most of my screen all the time.
Anyway, I'm not surprised about misdirected and deleted mail. AOL would delete old mail at its own discretion after a certain length of time, and anything I wanted to save I had to manually cut and paste as a text file because there was no good, clean way of backing anything up. The fact that AOL mail reads HTML by default is terrible; the fact that it doesn't educate the users or explain to them the concept of HTML mail is even worse -- half the things you get from other AOL members are yellow text on a hot pink background just as bad as any poorly made Geocities page (they even let you use images as backgrounds for mail). The fonts and colours may or may not show up when sending the mail to addresses outside AOL. The "unsend" feature is just a bad idea all around. I remember being frustrated with the attachment limits when trying to send ZIP files of artwork to my friends. One of the most irritating things at the time was that AOL refused to open/read many MIME types of attachments, so when someone not on AOL sent me a file, nine times out of ten I couldn't open it.
I fail to see how AOL mail could be useful to anyone except the most basic internet users. I also fail to see how anyone with any amount of intelligence could think it capable of being used for anything more. I, by no means, use e-mail at any kind of a "corporate" level (I get maybe two dozen messages a day at the most), and it wasn't even adequate for my purposes.
My Webcomic: Asylum on 5th Street
We have actually been setting up some Sun Enterprise 280R's this week to solve this problem...
The thing is, EVERYONE here knew this was going to happen, but office politics are to blame.
When I worked at Compuserve they forced us to switch after the buyout. The rational was that by all of using it the AOL mail system would improve.
Problem was that it never got better. Basic features of mail clients were discarded as not nessesary for the typical AOL user.
And then of course they created the "IMAP" interface to their mail system. Except it was IMAP without any of the features of IMAP. Their implementation was essentialy a POP3 interface running on the IMAP ports.
Versions 5.5 and 2000
No joke.
Actually, Hotmail was migrated to Windows 2000 a couple years ago.
While the CLIENT software may have been custom, it sounds like the SERVER portion was standard AOL. This would explain the attachment limits, spammer tagging, etc.
Also, since AOL is planning on using a mozilla like system replaincing IE, and has been putting big bucks into continued Netscape browser developement, my guess is that the client software was netscape 6 based. Considering how stable NS6 is, coupled with the AOL server backend, it's no wonder the system sucked.
"Well, I would say that the logic is that any company that could use it's own products and doesn't opens itself up to criticism concerning the quality of said products [...] If AOL/TW doesn't use the email system that AOL/TW sells, then what does it say about that email system?"
It says that their products are appropriate for their intended consumer audience and not necessarily for everyone. AOL markets to the low end, the new user, and their product is perfectly appropriate to that user. It is not nearly appropriate for business use.
I used to work at Kraft Foods, and I assure you that at company headquarters the cafeteria does not serve Minute Rice, Stove Top stuffing, or Oscar Mayer wieners.
My favorite expression for these kind of top-down decisions, that essentially come down to "because I said so!", is:
"are we discussing this, or are we going to Tahiti."
I picked up the expression from this John Soat column where he told a story about the GAP and their decision to replace Lotus Notes with Exchange.
** The opinions expressed here are my own, and do not reflect those of my employers - past, present, or future**
This wasn't the same AOL Email that consumers use.
According to the article:"The various types of e-mail software used by employees aren't the same as those used by America Online subscribers at home. Instead, the divisions customized AOL products, such as those from its Netscape unit".
So, while this really sucks for AOL, it's not as bad as some people think. On the other hand, I work L3 tech for a web host, and we hear almost daily from AOL (l)users about messages being forwarded to AOL accounts and being lost forever, or showing up weeks later.
"A terrorist is someone who has a bomb but doesn't have an air force." -William Blum
Yes it could be done with an internet page and an ftp site, and of course you'd still have to email the person the password and account name.
I think your missing the point. Why go to the expense of developing and maintaining that solution. Why reduce yourself to a system with 3 points of failure (intranet, ftp, email). An attachment in email does the job just as well, and it's simpler and less time consuming for everyone. An ftp server is a good way to distribute the same file to many people. If you're going to send different large files to different individuals, it's not the right solution.
You have enormous balls, to actually admit to having anything to do with that system.
Are we both talking about the world's largest mail system, the one that handles over 3,000 pieces per SECOND in a single namespace, that blocks a hundred million pieces of spam a day coming FROM the net, that hardly lets any spam out TO the net, that sends intra-AOL mail, with zero loss, live bad-address feedback, and two-phase commit in under a second, that scales better and cheaper than sendmail and qmail and zmail and imapd and Critical Path and PostOffice and every other COTS server, that can route itself around nearly any kind of hardware or network or even site outage without even queueing transactions, that can manage each mailbox redundantly across multiple sites, that has been the single biggest hardware installation of any fault-tolerant platform it's run on, that allows every piece of hardware and software to be replaced with the system up, that is more tunable than a Steinway and more monitorable than a T22, that is the ONLY large mail system that's been running outage-free since 1998?
The only balls it took were for me to appear to take full credit for something that I only rewrote, not wrote, that was later rewritten again by the highly talented development team I hired, and that was maintained and improved throughout by an equally talented sysadmin team reporting to my counterpart in operations.
I'm sorry if it's not skinnable or buzzword-compliant or 1337 or free (as in bird). There are lots of end-user features that I wish it had, that might have made it more suitable for TW, but that the business folks prioritized below other features. And keeping a high-effectiveness, low-collateral-loss spam filter working when you're the spammers' biggest target is a 24x7 battle of impossibilities. But from an engineering perspective? Every vendor, every contractor, every partner who has seen the design of this system knows there's no other mail server that even comes close. HP once told us: "You don't push the envelope. You perforate it."
You should do so well.