Slashdot Mirror
AOL Launches Free Webmail Service
kmilani2134 writes "America Online is moving into the Web-based e-mail market on Wednesday by tying e-mail into its popular AOL Instant Messenger service. Called AIM Mail, the service marks AOL's latest attempt to reposition itself as a broad portal rather than a subscriber-based service. It also will compete more directly against Yahoo Inc, Microsoft Corp.'s MSN division and Google Inc., all of which have battled over Webmail storage and features over the past year. This was covered by both eWeek and InternetNews.com. Of note, they seem to have incorporated the Mailblocks spam filtering and tracker addresses into their service. It will be interesting to see how long before these new 2 GB accounts are inundated with spam."
It has been a long time since I used AOL. I seem to recall they had problems such as employees stealing entire databases of info and selling it to spammers. How are their spam filters now, and how likely are you to receive spam just for being a member?
It's also a bit amusing that all these large portal companies like AOL are trying to compete with services like Gmail that don't even provide anything other than email. Google is still not an ISP as far as I know...
Google bumped GMail up to 2GB when other companies started offering 1GB. What do you want to bet that Google will now bump it up to 3GB?
The only reason I used to maintain an AOL account was because when I was in (just about any) tiny little shit hole in some foreign country half way around the world, I could get a dial-up connection. Many people subscribe for this spacific reason.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
and it has gotten the step motherly treatment since then. Before Goldman expired, Mailblocks was updated regularly every 4-5 months.
AIM mail is based on mailblocks. Around the beginning of 2004, Mailblocks was gaining a lot of customers. Once AOL acquired it, mailblocks went into a time wrap. Even now the mail quota is a paltry 15MB. I sent 2-3 mails to mailblocks support asking whether they plan to allow mail quotas higher than 100MB. They gave no definite answer.
So I abandoned mailblocks, moved all my mail to a hosting server, soon after that I tried gmail but webmail and pop3 just doesn't cut it once you're used to IMAP. So the only alternative was fastmail and I'm happy with it now.
Many mailblocks customers have abandoned their accounts but if mailblocks does get 2GB quotas, I'm sure many former users might give it a try again. AIM mail may provide a lot of space but it is not compelling compared to gmail. Eweek says that IMAP support will be provided but will it be free? If it is, then it might be interesting.
they're simply another commodity asset of the provider.
I'd go as far as to say that it isn't so much that the user is the product.
In traditional capitalism, the end user paid money to get a product or service. Now that we are entering more of an information age, the end user basically has to endure advertising instead of paying money. The "contract" is that the information given is good/entertaining enough. The hope is, of course, that the end user ends up purchasing products advertised. But this would basically require that most of the economy is run in a traditional model, otherwise none of those advertising dollars would be offered up.
This is no different than the economic model that television broadcasting has run on for the last half century or so. Ironically, this means that it does not make sense for a network TV station to put out quality programming. If the viewers are the product, then the TV stations want the product to be as high quality as possible. In this case, highest quality means easist to influence by advertising. So, TV stations must then put out mostly lowest common denominator programming in order to attract the customers which will make them the most money.
I'll never make that mistake again, reading the experts' opinions. - Feynman
It was then that I noticed that I could not log on to my screen name anymore. It had been Suspended. What a great surprise to wake up to.
Apparently, AOL's policy on free services is as follows: "You can use our free services as much as you like. If, however, you ever give us money, you have to continue doing so to keep using the free things. If you don't, suck it up and make another account."
Really. I called tech support and spent roughly 2 hours talking to various people, trying to get them to convert my account to a free AIM account. According to the people I talked to, their database supports conversion of AIM accounts into AOL subscriber accounts, but going the other way is not supported for some reason. They actually suggested that I make a new screen name "like your old one with a number after it". No! I want my screen name, not a new one!
I ultimately got a new AIM account for IMing, but it was terribly annoying. I had lost my entire buddy list, profile, and other account data. That sucked. They said that if I waited 6 months or so, my account would be purged and I could possible make it again, but I didn't feel like waiting that long.
In conclusion, once you become a subscriber, you're stuck that way forever. Unless, of course, you don't mind the hassle of making a new account.
I own itburns.net. What should I put there?
Will AIM Mail be subjected to the same arbitrary, unexplained and untested filtering that AOL mail currently is?
As administrator for a mailing list service that has had cooperative whitelisted status with AOL for the better part of a decade, I must report that recent changes to AOL mail have made it impossible for us to offer consistent delivery to AOL customers -- even despite our whitelisted status.
AOL will now block mail due to "malformed URLs" and "URLS with complaints" -- but they won't explain which URL in the message they're blocking, won't exempt whitelisted services, and won't test the validity of complaints before blocking mail.
When you combine this with the fact that many users today can't be bothered to unsubscribe, so they just report mail from a list they're bored with as spam, we end up with cases like these two that occurred this past week alone.
- On one list, the list-owner's events page was rejected as a "complaint URL"
- On another list, a list-owner's off-site searchable archive of their own list was rejected as a "complaint URL"
And the only way we know those were the URLs in question was by sending test messages, one URL at a time of the 5 to 10 appearing in the messages, to our own AOL account and seeing what din't get through.
For the first time in the over 14 years I have managed this service, I am actively suggesting subscribers not receive their list messages at AOL or Compuserve, because we can't guarantee they'll get through no matter how well we behave and how much time and energy we put into it.
So I ask you: any reason not to warn hem away from AIM Mail too?
If you think that a corporation is limited to standard free AIM accounts then you're seriously mistaken. A quick glance through AIM@Work shows that corporations have the ability to restrict logins based on IP#, authenticate against the corporation's LDAP server, provide users with person@corporation.com chat names to match corporate e-mail addresses, encryption via certificates, and other features that cater to corporate IM needs. This is perfect when you want to deal with other corporations while giving your company a presence in an incredibly populated IM service. This is great because you don't want to go giving ALL of your client's accounts on your corporate Jabber server... A perfect example of this all are those mac.com chat addresses that Apple gives out with their mac.com subscription. You know who those people are affiliated with as soon as they IM you. AIM@Work is good business. It's much more flexible and secure than regular AIM and it's MUCH more widely used than private Jabber (or whatever else) servers.
On top of all that, even a standard AIM account is capable of securing IM's by using things like OTR so it doesn't matter how many 3rd party servers the messages go through. Besides, saying that people shouldn't communicate through 3rd party servers is like saying "call them on a purely POTS telephone line." It's pretty much impossible. Every online communication standard goes through 3rd party servers, and this even includes things that aren't considered online, such as your long distance, your cell phone, and probably your local land line.