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AOL Plans to Offer Free Webmail

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the you've-got-korean-spam dept.

UltimaGuy writes "AOL plans to offer a free webmail service to compete directly with Yahoo, Hotmail and Gmail. Does this mean AOL is trying to become something which it is not?"

6 of 211 comments (clear)

  1. One problem... by koreaman · · Score: 2, Interesting

    If any of you got banned from aim, you will remember that AOL's DB admins are all idiots. I wouldn't want to trust my email to that.

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  2. Re:AOL trying to be good? Haha, by Performaman · · Score: 1, Interesting

    AOL Instant Messanger. Kids these days think that there is no other way to communicate.

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    I have gas, but my car uses petrol.
  3. But how to make $$ without the adware and spyware? by motika · · Score: 2, Interesting

    This makes no sense. How will AOL benefit if it can't install enough spyware and adware on your computer to bring it to a crawl? I had to install the demon on my work computer, since AOL users were not able to keep sessions on our server due to its proxy farms. It tries to run 4 background apps, one of which eats 11M of memory which claims to be a spyware blocker. Right. Due to the proxy farms browsing with AOL over DSL is like going back to 1994 over 14.4 dialup. It took 30 seconds to get pages which should have taken 5. Then again, I wish them a hearty does of failure!

  4. Re:What they're not? Nah... by Havokmon · · Score: 4, Interesting
    AOL is a business, businesses don't do "free" without some catch. Their free mail offering is nothing more than a hook to get the AOL brandname back into peoples' minds

    Ahhh but as a 'free' webmail provider myself, I can tell you the conversion rate from free to "paid something" is quite small. They're going to have to pull in a LOT of free users, or provide something out of the ordinary to get people to pay up.

    I wouldn't suggest trying to leverage 'free' into 'paid' as a business model.

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    "I can't give you a brain, so I'll give you a diploma" - The Great Oz (blatently stolen sig)
  5. Hmmm.... by macthulhu · · Score: 3, Interesting
    As an employee of The Death Star... errrr... Time Warner, I think it's safe to say that the only way this thing will work, is if they outsource their IT jobs. If the clowns running it now are the ones they rely on to keep it up and running right, it will die a quick embarrasing death. I mean, these are guys who remotely access everyone's computers at night and remove printer drivers for the printers they shipped us... Or disable all of the audio hardware on laptops used for presentations... Then they get all peeved when their phones start ringing. I realize that's a small issue, as long as it's not your printer, but it's indicative of the sharpness of the tools in our shed.

    I have to go now... there are some men here to escort me to the re-education chamber for speaking out about our hard working, highly skilled IT workers.

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    Someday a real rain is gonna come...

  6. Are there really any web apps as good as client? by tjstork · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I've yet to see a web application as good as a comparable client application.

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