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."

Comments

Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

An email client. Now I can use email.

Re:Not another one...

[ls671]

I'll stick with what I have, thanks.

For me, it is still pine accessed through VNC tunnelled through ssh. All my email addresses are forwarded or popped to one host so I only need to check in one place. With pine filters and rules, all emails go in the right folders automatically after I read them from my Inbox. Some less important stuff is filtered to go in the right folders even before I read it. Pine integrates well with pgp/gpg and eliminates all the html crap, images and what not.

Everything also goes through mailscanner/clamav/spamassassin before getting to my main Inbox.

I then forward everything to my gmail account just for redundancy and to be able to access my emails from corporate networks that don't allow you to use ssh. When I ever post from gmail (rarely), it goes to my host smtp server so all replies go to my host, not gmail. I keep my gmail address confidential so I do not need to bother checking it.

I delete all my gmail Inbox once every week or so...