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AOL's New Alto Client Is Visual Email, and You Don't Need a New Address
pigrabbitbear writes "AOL, still looking to reboot itself from the dialup days, is shooting to actually change the way we deal with email. The company's new service, called Alto, isn't a new email client. You don't have to sign up for yet another email address, because as David Temkin, AOL's senior VP of mail said, 'We need another email address like we need a hole in the head.' Instead, Alto, which is in limited release starting today, is designed to be an intelligent aggregator of the email accounts you already have."
An email client. Now I can use email.
It only works with AOL mail, gmail, Yahoo mail, and some ecloud stuff. Even if it worked with other email providers, it would just provide another way to screw up mail-gathering. I'll stick with what I have, thanks.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
That's what all Alto email looks like. You pick your image, add your text, and boom, instant email.
Well, since this means that you'll be reading your @gmail.com email through Alto, instead of through Gmail, it also means that you'll be seeing AOL ads and not Google ads. How long will it be until Google, Yahoo, and Apple change their API or terms of service to ban this?
"You have spam!"
A while back someone figured out how to spoof aol email and send stuff not just to your peeps, but to everyone cc'd on emails sent to you, like people 3 circles of friends away in joke forwardings.
This seemed to clear up a few months ago. Easy to mock AOL (or Wndows for that matter) but I wouldn't wanna be the engineers in charge of fighting off motivated engineers from shitholes around the world.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Thunderbird or Outlook HOW?
.forward files don't cut it ?
Sorry. Stupid.
oh this so reminds me of http://xkcd.com/927/
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
Well, I have a few holes in my head that are necessary for my survival. So you're saying Alto is necessary for my survival? Cool.
>> Alto...is...an...aggregator of the email accounts you already have."
Aha - a web-based email client.
Back to the days of limited browser support (firefox AND chrome this time)! Can't wait to relive the days!
Also, do I need aggregated everything? No, I need all those nitwits with outlook to stop writing such atrocious mails. Badly formatted, incompatibly threaded, gratuitously quoted, laid out to discourage reading, poor spelling, grammar, punctuation, AND language, and devoid of meaning. And to top it all off, indistinguishable from real spam!
This is something technology cannot wholly fix, though it clearly can facilitate it and we should make the nitwits abandon their beloved extremely poorly playing with others software to stop that. Then we should educate them, starting with the basics. Most of them would do better writing notes on typewriters, OCRing the notes, and sending that. That's how far they, and thus we, have to go.
We don't need more software for that. We need more clues to go 'round.
As I am a musician, and sing Alto.. is it mandatory that I use this service?
Email clients today allow you to easily and effectively organize all of your email Addys in one UI, neatly broken out by Source and Content Folders. So I'm seeing Alto as a big fat question mark, except for the fact that AOL is now a company looking for a raison d'etre.
So they're gonna aggregate everybody's email, suck out the interesting bits, grow huge amounts of data on millions of users... OH, now I see... they wanna be a PoBoy Facebook. Well why didn't you guys just come out and say "Hey we need a cup of data to stay alive, please give a starving corporation a break."
Maybe y'all could invent a round thing to move heavy objects on.
The company's new service, called Alto, isn't a new email client.
Alto, which is in limited release starting today, is designed to be an intelligent aggregator of the email accounts you already have.
Sure as hell sounds like an email client to me.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Quoth, for instance: "Theyâ(TM)re like folders or labels, but managed through an intuitive drag-and-drop interface, and allowing users to decide that they want to make large swaths of their email bypass the main inbox entirely, to be saved in Stacks where they can be read later."
So... like folders or labels, but with filters on them! You know, filters, like Thunderbird and gmail have both supported since basically the beginning of time?
AOL just found out about procmail?
... is that you're expected to work 50 hour weeks. Forget annual pay, how much do these companies pay per hour?
AOL's 3 remaining customers are going to use a new application to aggregate their mail from services that already provide more functionality than AOL does in an attempt to show relevant value and usefulness. One of the 3 customers, known simply as "granma" was quoted as saying "Now I don't have to remember all those complicated things like gee mails and yahooie for when I need to tell my grandson that the guv'ment is going to start charging for email, or if I forward this message bill gates is going to give me a dollar!".
Cool story, would read again, +1, +like & stuff. Need's more bitcoin.
01:36AM up 426 days, 2:46, 1 user, load average: 0.14, 0.11, 0.05
Well, I have a few holes in my head that are necessary for my survival. So you're saying Alto is necessary for my survival? Cool.
Yup, just stick your noggin in this here clamp and we'll get the install going for you!
Now, should I use the 1/2" wood-bore or the concrete bit? Hmm...
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Some companys just don't have the decency to lay down and die when their time is over... It's so sad.
My parents are still on Compuserve dial-up. It's all their fault.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Kind of like any email client on the market? Making all your emails be in one place?
Not you. I will be here waiting for their apologies.
Been doing that since mid-90's, how's this new?
I've got to say it's certainly an interesting enough of an idea and interface to make me at least give it a shot. This is the kind of stuff that AOL is going to need to do if they want to have any shot at getting back into the market instead of resting on their rears and hoping the seniors keep paying out to them for a 15 year old service.
Never has a username been so relevant.
I tried to request an invitation for my self-hosted address. "That email system is not supported". Thanks. So it's only for people that have more than one account on the above list apparently.
Matthew @ Bytemark Hosting
AOL's in-house problem was 'How do we get people to use us instead of Google/Facebook/etc'. Pretty quickly, they figured out that the sort of people that might use, or at least try, AOL were very uninterested in the hassle of switching email addresses.
So the next approach was how do we get people to switch to us without switching email addresses. Hence this bizarre little client and its bizarre marketing.
I'm not saying it's a great solution. It's just the best the techs could come up with to deal with what AOL's executives wanted.
Knowing AOL's prior shit security (Coach Account Access, anyone?) how long until this shit gets cracked and emails get stolen?
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Once it gets it's teeth in you, it'll drag you under water, spin you around sharply to break your neck, then stuff you under the bank to tenderize for a while.
What's that? OH, AGGERGATOR!!! Same advice really.
Hole saw.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
I'm all for whatever they want to do, just so long as the thing doesn't default to sending HTML-ized text that shows up as garbage in my email client. Of course if they default to HTML-ized garbage, then I will hunt down the IP addresses of every SMTP server they use and block them.
'Alto' = 'Stop' in Spanish...
When you're dead, you don't know you're dead. It only affects the people around you. Same thing when you're stupid.
You know, if you just stopped subscribing to illegal Malaysian wombat pr0n sites, you wouldn't have to go to such ridiculous lengths to sanitize your email...
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
David Temkin, AOL's senior VP of mail said, 'We need another email address like we need another hole in the head.'
There. Fixed it for him.
AOL is not to be trusted. They have engaged in massive spying operations for decades now.
You'd have to be stupid to use this pathetic product.
I'm thinking of buying AOL, but have only one dollar bills in my pocket. Do you think they can make change? I'm not sure AOL is worth $1.00.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
Yeah, not going to be supported even by MS soon; but that's beside the point. It's EMAIL, for cryin' out loud. It ought to work with Lynx, or by sending raw HTTP requests vial Telnet. Actually, POP3 itself is rasonably accessed via Telnet. Webified anything in a terminal is really not practical.
In other words, all the Web 2 million.0 kewlness is the first strike against it.
The 2nd strike is that it just introduces another point of failure. "Is my Yahoo mail server down or is AOL down?" is not a question I want to be asking. Ever.
Procmail and fetchmail with data mining and a web interface. Just what I've always wanted....you shouldn't have. No, really, you shouldn't have. Here I'll put it over here with that @aim.com address you gave my aim screen name years back. I can finally migrate my fidonet stuff somewhere...
I have exactly three - business, personal, and the account I use to sign up for things on the Internet, and none of those need to be aggregated with the others.
Tor Mail:
http://www.tormail.org/
which leads to the Tor Hidden Service:
http://jhiwjjlqpyawmpjx.onion/
AOL, can you provide a hidden service to match? Aww, I didn't think so.
I've been on my family's AOL account for a good decade and half. I have other e-mail accounts, but AOL maybe bit dated but established.
I got no problems with it as is. I don't need stupid thing become more annoying in sense of completely new type software. If they want survive, i'd wish they give paying people option to choose not to change their clients to some cloud base one. I'm ludy, i don't trust Cloud based software.
It's an email client that can be configured with multiple accounts ... just like all the other ones.
The "auto image" display will mean that spammers can determine active email addresses. This goes away from the previous trend where images are only diplayed if you explicitly download so that spammers would have no idea if james.bog121@gmail.com is a real email address or not.
I clicked on the link to Alto and got this:
OOPS!
It looks like you're using an older version of Internet Explorer. The application works best with the latest version. UPDATE BROWSER
Can someone who got there confirm that the website is comprised of large, multi-colored centered content and makes liberal use of blinking text ?
for trying this out? After reading TFA it looks like it's a product useful to me. It seems to deal more directly than most clients with the functions e-mail serves these days.
Every single time, ever, that someone has told me that something would "change the way I work", it never has. Not once. Except in a case or two where it "changed the way I worked" by stopping me being able to work, and then eventually getting scrapped.
And every single thing that *HAS* genuinely changed the way I work has come not from marketers telling me that would be so but by a stealthy, insidious insertion of something quite simple into my daily life and then one day realising I couldn't do without it.
So, by that history, this looks like something I'll say "And?" to and then never hear of it again. Can I come back in 5 years and see if I'm wrong?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M0zgj2p7Ww4
Visual email?
As opposed to what? Voicemail? Braille-mail?