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Transferring Mail from AOL?

Posted by Cliff on from the preserving-important-content dept.

Bazooka Joel asks: "My father has been a long time user of AOL. He subscribed to AOL's dialup service about 5 years ago and created his first email account with their services. We now have cable internet from a local company, but he still pays $15 a month just to access his email. I have tried to get him to switch to Gmail, but he is stubborn. He finally relented and said that if I could forward all of his old mail (thousands of messages) and import his contact list into Gmail, he would cancel his AOL subscription. After searching the 'net, I found a way to import his contacts. However, I cannot find a program that will forward all of his old mail. Can anybody lend me a hand?"

2 of 102 comments (clear)

  1. Re:IMAP? by jesboat · · Score: 2, Interesting

    You can't upload email through POP.

    I would suggest using Thunderbird to download all the mail from AOL's IMAP servers, burning a copy to CD (just in case), and then redirecting/bouncing/remailing/etc. every message to the gmail account.

  2. Re:There's a $3 AOL plan... (um, no, it's free) by Khyron · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I think they used to charge for the "just webmail" service but now it's free and even supports IMAP. They give you 2GB of space IIRC. For more details:

    http://www.aim.com/ (click on webmail)