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Time Warner Finds AOL Email Inadequate

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the so-easy-to-use dept.

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."

39 of 351 comments (clear)

  1. Obviously no one paid attention by wikki · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Obviously the person who sent out that decree has either a. never used aol mail, or b. never used email in a corporate environment. AOL limits the number of messages and attachment sizes. Only lets you save the files in "AOL" format. Folders are limited, and you can't create rules. It is made for the old grandma and grandpa to be able to communicate with their grandkids and send them pictures and other cute little notes. If someone had done just 10 mintues of thinking on this they would have realized the mistake they were making.

    1. Re:Obviously no one paid attention by great+throwdini · · Score: 4, Informative

      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":

      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.

      Emphasis mine, smartass.

    2. Re:Obviously no one paid attention by TedCheshireAcad · · Score: 5, Insightful

      This seems to be a classic example of if-it-aint-broke-don't-fix-it syndrome. TW's previous system seemed to handle their needs, and after the merger, they switched to AOL? Does anyone see the logic behind this? If you have a system that gets the job done without complaints, don't change it.

      ~my $.02

    3. Re:Obviously no one paid attention by walt-sjc · · Score: 3, Informative

      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.

    4. Re:Obviously no one paid attention by ethereal · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I'm going to coin a phrase:

      "Standardization is the last refuge of an incompetent CIO"

      This is from a company where the ultra-reliable sendmail servers were replaced with Exchange, which has been down corporate wide for up to a week at a time. All so that we could standardize on Microsoft.

      Hmmm, maybe it's the "Microsoft" part that really makes the CIO "incompetent"?

      I'll grant that there are benefits to standardization, but it seems like large corporate standardization efforts are driven top-down; nobody asks the users what they want or even what they need to get their jobs done. So the results satisfy some sort of CIO goals checklist, but the real result is that lots of time at the ground level is wasted. It's like top executives are allergic to feedback that doesn't come from Wall Street sycophants or something.

      --

      Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and

  2. So what's the old system? by sheldon · · Score: 5, Funny

    AOL is gonna be really angry if Time Warner switches to using Hotmail.com. :-)

  3. Why use AOL? by DrXym · · Score: 3, Interesting
    I don't know if they're using the AOL client or not but there should be no need for them to either. AOL owns Netscape and owns a share in iPlanet so there are plenty of "normal" email options to choose from both on client and server.


    Perhaps some overzealous manager issued an edict that everyone *must* use AOL even though it's email software is next to useless in a work environment.

  4. No Real Suprise Here by lysurgon · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I've always been somewhat mystified at the way AOL has been able to sell inferior services (slow service, high downtime, poor chat/email feature) to millions of users. Testiment to the power of marketing I suppose. On the other hand, that "community" stuff is a real thing...

    Of course, now that they're in the business arena where a few hours of downtime means more than wating till tomorrow to send that email to grandma, and lo and behold they just can't cut it. MSN has the same problems. No credible business can put up with their downtimes and outages.

    Now the executive level is beginning to understand how important these issues are. Someone could make a nice bundle of money by creating a credible business-class isp that doesn't suck (e.g. worldcom... generation d? yeah right).

    --


    Howard Dean for president
  5. Re:You've got mail! by Codifex+Maximus · · Score: 3, Funny

    Heh...

    You've got mail!
    You've got...
    You've got...
    You've...
    You've...
    You...
    This program has performed an Illegal Operation and will be shut down.

    --
    Codifex Maximus ~ In search of... a shorter sig.
  6. A classic "suit" decision by jht · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Bob Pittman may be the darling of Wall Street, but their decision to dogfood themselves was the kind of shortsighted, Dilbert-esque decision that only a suit with no connection with technical reality could make. I suspect nobody ever bothered to talk to the people who admin the various systems that were replaced - heck, it wouldn't surprise me if the CTO (whoever that is) wasn't even involved.

    Even if they had switched in the long term, they tackled this project way too quickly (it's been just over a year since the merger went through) and it's glaringly obvious that they didn't think things through very well. Messaging on that kind of scale (multiple operating companies with differing hardware/OS standards, tens of thousands of employees) is not trivial to implement or manage and the suits upstairs should have either known better or had advisors to listen to who could have told them it was a bad idea.

    This'll probably wind up in a business textbook someday in the "how not to integrate merged companies" chapter.

    --
    -- Josh Turiel
    "2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
  7. :D That's funny by The+Great+Wakka · · Score: 3, Funny

    All these years I've said "the problem isn't on my end, it's on YOURS!". Now I have proof.

    --
    Everything is mainstream now.
  8. Re:Look who is talking... by TheTomcat · · Score: 5, Informative

    Uh.. it's a WSJ article.
    It says so right at the top.
    MSNBC generally carries Wire stories.

    good kneejerking, though.

  9. Classic Problem by 4of12 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Funny. With tens of millions of consumers having to relay upon AOL email that their internal business units find it "inadequate".

    It reminds of the dichotomy you find between "consumer" grade and "commercial" grade items, whether it be email systems or computer hardware or even construction.

    Consumer grade has always been so price conscious that quality suffers, where commercial grade is always more expensive.

    Software shouldn't have to be subject to the rule of this dichotomy, though.

    AOL should clean up their act and put some efforts into adapting some open source email solutions to make them scalable to 1e7 users and to put on the shiny EZ front end that their consumers have come to expect.

    --
    "Provided by the management for your protection."
  10. Sanity Check by agrounds · · Score: 3, Funny

    Not to undermind the braintrust of IT professionals at the Time Warner offices or anything.. but how could anyone firing on more than three synapses honestly find the AOL GUI-From-Hell to be a professional grade internet and mail delivery system? I can almost picture the hilarity that would ensue if I was to walk into any of my department or regional managers office and installed a mail application that featured more than four 'smiley faces buttons' and clicking on 'hearts' to access the company address book. By hilarity I mean: Termination Notice. It would only truly be classic, is when one of those poor helldesk drones plugged in the CAT5 to the wall plate, and the computer erupted into a frenzy of busy-signals and asking (politely, to be sure) to try a different wall plate.

    Tragic!

  11. I thought that AOL was... by cnelzie · · Score: 3, Insightful


    ...designed for the consumer market, not the corporate market. So, it really is no wonder that it was simply found to be inadequete for the needs of the corporate users.

    Of course, it probably didn't help that the reputation of people with the following addresses. (You know there is that stigma about people that use AOL.) :

    Editor_in_Chief_Time@aol.com

    Technology_Correspondent_Time@aol.com

    Enough of the fun though. This problem is not an isolated incident with AOL. This type of thing is how most large businesses are run. Someone high-up gets this hairbrained idea and then pushes it through. Regardless of how inadequete the technology is and how difficult the transition can be.

    I work in a situation similar to that right now. It used to be that the outlying vendors, of this major corporation, used to interact with ordering replacement units, checking on warranty status and recieving corporate memos through a satellite connection on dumb terminals.

    Now, someone has gotten the bright idea that they need to change from dumb terminals, to having full blown MS Windows machines running a web browser to perform those same tasks. These days, the time to perform the simplest task takes nearly three times what it used to (For both relearning and simply downloading nearly one hundred times the old amount of data.)

    The other major problem is, instead of dumb terminals that the end-users are unable to fiddle with. They now have MS Windows machines that they are responsible to maintain, which is the farthest thing from their mind.

    To them, the new stuff is hard, slow and a royal pain in the rear.

    Unfortunately, someone got a bug in their rear to push forward this great new technology. So, that is what is happening. I can see them going back to the way it used to be in about 5 to 10 years, after they "recoup" the losses in development and find out how much money it is going to cost them to have phone support staff handle the call volume.

    --
    .sig seperator
    --

    --
    If you ignore the other uses of a tool, does that make the tool less useful, or you less useful?
  12. Re:Look who is talking... by tswinzig · · Score: 4, Funny

    I looked who was talking, and it was THE WALL STREET JOURNAL.

    Check the byline of the authors.

    --

    "And like that ... he's gone."
  13. Dogfood by jjjpinkojjj · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I work for AOL Time Warner, and it was indeed, a directive that came from the top. We *had* to use Netscape 6.2 for all corporate email. Truth be told, the Netscape client is buggy enough, but the real kicker was the AOL email servers that we have to connect to... Unreachable perhaps 25% of the time, and totally unfit for professional use.

    Funny thing is, this Slashdot article is the first I've heard about switching back! Mega-corporation which will be crushed under its own weight? Naaa.

    I was getting sick of eating my own dogfood, anyway.

    --
    I'd like to dip my balls in that.
  14. AOL/Time Warner swears they'll eat own dog food by Ukab+the+Great · · Score: 5, Funny

    To deal with this mail problem and not look like hypocrites, AOL will create a new proprietary mail protocol called ALPO (AOL + POP).

  15. What I'd like to know is... by tswinzig · · Score: 3, Insightful

    What exactly constitutes "AOL email services," and where was the problem exactly?

    Mail being lost, large attachments not allowed, being classified as a 'spammer' if you BCC to too many people... that sounds like a problem with AOL's mail servers. But the article seems focused on AOL's use of their new Netscape products (presumably NS 6.x), which doesn't really jive with the complaints in the article...

    --

    "And like that ... he's gone."
    1. Re:What I'd like to know is... by Jay+L · · Score: 5, Interesting

      What exactly constitutes "AOL email services," and where was the problem exactly?

      I left AOL before most of this actually hit production. But when I was there, the problem was basically this:

      - Wrong tool for the job. AOL mail, as many have said, was not originally designed to be a corporate server. AOL itself, minus the Unix geeks, has used AOL e-mail via the AOL client since about 1989. But TW was using a big groupware server (Exchange or Lotus or the like), with forms, workflows, the whole bit. To change over to a text-and-attachment-based system was foolish; to do it in a few months was absurd. Many of us fought the idea vigorously, but in the end, the merger logistics team won the battle in the name of dogfood.

      - Worse, what TW was using *wasn't* our dog food - that was the AOL client and servers, which is incredibly reliable and instantaneous for internal mail, and pretty darn good for Internet mail in the past few years - average delivery time in the seconds. But what TW needed to use was the IMAP gateway. The developers on that are excellent, but have never been given the time to really mature the product. Some major architecture changes kept getting pushed back for more urgent matters, both real and perceived. And while the IMAP server speaks nearly perfect IMAP, no client does; we didn't have the time or cooperation to figure out how to work around bugs in OE or Outlook.

      - It sounds like they were trying to use the Netscape client. As we all know, that's a couple revs behind Mozilla, and even Mozilla mail doesn't feel quite ready for prime time yet to me.

      - Obviously, Gerald Levin didn't want to be GeraldL982341@aol.com, so we tried to graft an aliasing system on top. Sounds from the "misdirected mail" like it either didn't work out or (more likely) was prone to user error.

      - tswinzig mentions the spam filters; that's a good point. I can see how they might have caused trouble, and by commingling internal and customer mail, you lose the ability to have the best configuration for each task.

      - However, the message limits and attachment-size limits would NOT be a problem. Those haven't been actual physical limits in years; they they are business rules and can be configured as needed. (Can you imagine how many copies of Windows XP would sit in people's mailboxes if every AOL member could send arbitrarily-sized attachments?)

      It's a shame. The AOL core mail system is actually much faster, more reliable, and cheaper to run than sendmail (if I do say so myself). But by putting TW on before it was ready, and before the resources could be committed to make it a first-class IMAP server, they screwed both TW and any chance of getting respectability as a business e-mail solution.

      Jay, the ex-AOL Mail Guy

  16. Whats next? by jhines0042 · · Score: 5, Funny

    The e-mail problems have led many staffers to resume pre-Internet habits. Employees say they are faxing and using Federal Express more than before. They also are picking up the phone or wandering down the corridors in search of human contact. "If all goes well, we'll never have to use e-mail and we'll have to start talking to each other again," says one magazine writer.

    Some of the employees have even decided to spend time with their children reading books printed on actual paper. One employee has decided to start up a band with some of his cube mates. "Jim here and I have been neighbors for over 3 years and we used to e-mail all the time, but now that e-mail has become unreliable I've had to actually get to know him. He's pretty groovy."

    --
    42 - So long and thanks for all the fish.
  17. I could have told them that. by Jin+Wicked · · Score: 3, Informative

    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
  18. As an AOL/TW Employee by qurob · · Score: 5, Informative



    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.

  19. Your classic case of Executive Shielding by JoeShmoe · · Score: 5, Interesting

    From the article "The reversal is particularly awkward for Robert Pittman, AOL Time Warner's co-chief operating officer, who had pushed through the move to use AOL's e-mail."

    How many people here thing that Mr. Pittman ever had a problem with his AOL mail? I'd bet dollars to pesos that anyone at AOL with a capital "C" in their title has their e-mail running off their own custom-built server.

    This was literally the case for one fortune 500 company I contracted for. The CEO/CIO/CFO had their own Compaq Proliant server fully loaded (for the time). It was segregated from the other machines and was constantly watched by at least one Network Engineer. The rest of the company was subjected to constant crap in switching from AT&T outsourcing of e-mail service to in-house properly deployed UNIX solution, then someone falling for the Netscape sales pitch and switching to that, then Microsoft saving us from Netscape by bringing in Exchange, then ended up having Exchange do the mail but Netscape do the directory services...etc.

    But the top right wing with all the mahogany furniture never once had a problem with their e-mail. Because of the aforementioned dedicated server which, as far as I know, was running the original UNIX solution and never got touched.

    The problem is that this solution can't be applied on a large scale. I think the Steve Case and company probably have (knowingly or unknowingly) been the victims of executive shielding. The people whose jobs rely on their satisfaction would be fools not to. But then along comes some Time Warner company. The AOL brass aren't going to recommended Executive Shielding because they probably don't know about it. The AOL techies doing the shielding aren't going to tell their Time Warner opposites because they don't report to Time Warner. And the Time Warner techies are going to walk naively into the situation and get their asses blamed. But after a year of fired techies you eventually figure out that maybe the problem isn't the staff, it's the damn product.

    Well that's just my impression anyway. But I wouldn't be at all surprised if it were true. I wonder how many people at Time Warner lost their job because they couldn't get a square peg through a round hole for Time Warner management. They never knew the answer was to use one of those new round holes with four corners.

    - JoeShmoe

    .

    --
    -- I wonder which will go down in history as the bigger failure: the War on Drugs or the War on Filesharing
    1. Re:Your classic case of Executive Shielding by Jay+L · · Score: 4, Insightful

      How many people here thing that Mr. Pittman ever had a problem with his AOL mail? I'd bet dollars to pesos that anyone at AOL with a capital "C" in their title has their e-mail running off their own custom-built server.

      How much you want to bet? It ain't so. They run the AOL client and read mail off the AOL servers, and have ever since AOL migrated off QuickMail around 1989. The problem is not with the AOL mail system per se, but with a total system that just doesn't fit together. See my post above.

      Jay "Chief Architect begins with a capital C too" Levitt

    2. Re:Your classic case of Executive Shielding by Jay+L · · Score: 5, Funny

      They may run "an" AOL client and they may read mail off "an" AOL server but how do you know they are the same client/server as what the rank and file use?

      Because I wrote the mail system.

      Jay

    3. Re:Your classic case of Executive Shielding by Jay+L · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

  20. Because AOL mandates it by topher71 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    In order to access any sort of internal AOL functionality, you have to use the AOL client and login as a 'special' employee accout.

    I worked at Netscape and when AOL took over, they forced everyone, including Unix developers, to use the AOL client to get to HR forms, 401K info, corporate email, etc.

    Netscape had spent 5 years getting every sort of internal functionality on the Net. All HR, 401K, Medical stuff, email, directory, whatever, was _all_ on the Net. Then AOL came in and mandated it all go away to be replaced by the fucking pathetic AOL client.

    Now I'm pissed just thinking about it.

    (BTW, I worked for AOL for 2 weeks.)

    --
    -- topher71
  21. Spammers = Corporate Executives????? by RobertAG · · Score: 5, Funny

    From the article: "and if they [senior and junior executives] tried to send messages to large groups of users they were labeled as spammers and locked out of the system.

    This is BAD THING??????? This "feature" should be used as a management training tool.

  22. Thye did it to Compuserve by geckofiend · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

    1. Re:Thye did it to Compuserve by Jay+L · · Score: 5, Informative

      Their implementation was essentialy a POP3 interface running on the IMAP ports.

      Actually, no. The core design of the AOL mail system is, coincidentally, a near-perfect fit to the IMAP disconnected model, with unique message IDs, per-part fetching (text vs. attachment), efficient indexes to read less-efficient messages, host-based storage, etc. It is NOTHING like POP3. In fact, as I recall, CS begged us to develop a POP3 server instead of IMAP, since CompuServe Classic had one, and we declined.

      The main problems were that (a) some aspects of MIME were never fully integrated into AOL mail, and (b) *every single* IMAP client is buggier (wrt protocol implementation) than you can possibly imagine, and we never had time or cooperation to work around all the bugs.

      I'd be curious to know which features you felt were 'discarded'. Aside from POP3, I don't remember declining any strong requests from CS while I was running the mail team.

  23. Re:Look who is talking... by Pfhreakaz0id · · Score: 3, Insightful

    whoever the F&*(! modded this up needs their privs revoked.

    1. They not only didn't read the article (it says Wall Street Journal), the ADMITTED it in the post.

    2. It's really clever to use an "$" instead of S in MS right? Huh? Get it?

    3. Everyone knows MSNBC has been lauded for being a surprisingly unbiased source for news about Microsoft anyway. Much better than, say, ZDnet.

    Get a clue.

    --
    DO NOT DISTURB THE SE
  24. Re:Bad Time Warner. by Chundra · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Well AOL and Time-Warner are part of one big happy family now. So it's not in their best interests to go suing eachother.

    If you're a troll, I'm insightful.

  25. As an AOL/TWC employee by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I have had my AOL mail account for months and never use it. No one in NOC does. Its an bother. And it crashes some other applications we have under development. How is that for humor? Turns out that the JVM AOL Mail uses is incompatible with just about every other JVM.

    And the other giggle. When a corporate announcement is sent out to the AOL Mail, one of the admin assistant's cut-and-pastes it into an email and sends it out to our everyday email account.

    If it wasnt for the free cable and RR acccounts....

  26. E-mail for magazine proofs and large files? by willith · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I'm not sure which is worse--that the employees were forced to use AOL e-mail at work, or that top level people at Time were using e-mail to send final page proofs that were apparently of a massive size.

    Do these people not have FTP? Is their IT department asleep at the wheel?

    1. Re:E-mail for magazine proofs and large files? by Maledictus · · Score: 5, Interesting

      "Do these people not have FTP? Is their IT department asleep at the wheel?"

      Don't blame the IT people for this. An FTP site that is easily accessible by internal prepress production and the outside designer isn't a guarantee that anyone will have a clue how to use it.

      I'm the "IT guy" (heh...) at a mid-sized commercial printing company. We have an easy-cheesy FTP set up that drops the files right on our proxy server. We have a link to the FTP site from the home page of our web site. (Plus our domain name is...oddly enough...the one-word name of the company.) Even the most file transfer impaired have all sorts of options to get large files to us. We're even going to go to some sort of on-line proofing system. Bet that'll be a can of worms

      Can people get us large file? Hell yeah! Do they? Huh? Hell no! "What's FTP?!"

      The problem is usually on the designer/ad agency end. I say "usually" because the folks here are *paid* to be technically savvy. If they can't retrieve a file off of our FTP site or any other, they probably should look for another job.

      The outside customers get scared if you tell them they have to type in a user name and password. Or if you tell them that apparently *their* firewall isn't letting them out, they drop back to a safe position like...

      ...email.

      And even that can be problematic. Things that we think are simple - compressing files, especially fonts; naming conventions that make sense; resolution issues - become a Big Deal. On the other hand, that's what we're paid to do, troubleshoot, help, smile, be happy, offer fries with that...

      I for one am glad AOL-Time Warner is eating their own pooch chow. Now I'll have even more ammo for my whining AOL customers. "I'm trying to send this, but YOUR email server says it's too big." MY email server can take it, baby!

      --
      Consigned to flames of woe.
    2. Re:E-mail for magazine proofs and large files? by flatrock · · Score: 3, Informative

      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.

  27. Re:Now all they have to do by Oliver+Wendell+Jones · · Score: 3, Funny

    Hell, they might as well find the entire AOL Time-Warner conglomerate inadequate, round up all the suits, shoot them, and use their carcasses to make pet food, hot dogs, and spam.

    Ewww... don't we get enough SPAM from AOL already?

    --
    A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing -- Emo Phillips
  28. A conflict of interest? by acoustix · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Is it just me or is this situation a bit strange?

    AOL is #1 in number of customers. They have the largest email system in the world.

    Time and AOL merge. No problem.

    AOL says: "Time, you gotta use our email system because we're the best. It will look good too!"

    Time: "Sounds great!"

    AOL: "We'll just take our existing consumer client and tweak it for business use. See, it is so easy, no wonder we're #1!"

    Time: "Uh, we can't send our large attachments which are vital to our company."

    AOL: "Oh, well that's because..."

    Time: "Our "tweaked" clients keep crashing too!"

    AOL: "Well, it wasn't..."

    Time: "2% of our emails aren't getting through"

    AOL: "Well, our system wasn't designed for this"

    Time: "How did you become #1 again?"

    I am pretty sure that this is going to tarnish AOL's image for being reliable. Especially since they've just gotten over the "busy-signal fiasco" of a couple years ago.

    If Time can't trust AOL with important emails, then how can AOL expect consumers to trust them with important emails as well?

    I like to think that my local ISP (or any local ISP) has better service than AOL any day.

    --
    "A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson