AOL's free AIM.COM e-mail supports IMAP

AOL's free AIM.COM e-mail offers 2GB of storage and (according to an article at the Inquirer: http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=24187)
also offers IMAP access so that almost any standard e-mail package including Mozilla's Thunderbird, Eudora, all versions of Netscape with an e-mail client, and Microsoft Outlook Express should be able to access it.

The article at the Inquirer liked the free offering from AOL quite a bit. The only disadvantage mentioned was to quote the article:

"Now the bad: the search feature is nowhere as powerful as GMail's. The web based "search" function apparently works merely on the sender or subject lines, and when you attempt to use the search function of your email client over IMAP and select the search to include the message bodies as well -which is a cpu-intensive operation on the imap4 server, if implemented- you get the message "Command 'SEARCH' not supported ", which clearly shows that AOL has decided not to enable it, or doesn't have it implemented on their servers. "

I use IMAP search all the time so I agree that I would love to have it available. However, 2GB of free storage and being able to use Thunderbird for access sounds great to me. I will most likely kill off my Netscape e-mail account and use this as my primary account very soon. Thus Netscape 7.2 will most likely be deleted from my PC as a result.

John Willems

 

I have been using @aim.com, since it became available (but, I avoid the IM part). It has been a bit more reliable than the disastrous Netscape Webmail.
Send mail has been a bit strange. I could send mail with my ISP SMTP, but could not with the apparent default conditions. It finally settled down to an authenticated set up, and the use of port 587, which has been used for AOL mail, in Mozilla or Thunderbird. Port 25 is optional for SMTP, although it has not worked for me.
At this point, the Search function is the last I would be concerned about, but there are limitations which I am not sure if they will be implemented or when.
But, I has had two accounts set up for nearly three weeks (both using the same username and password as @netscape.net). The only strange happening, which a friend of mine could not confirm, is that I find two copies of the same e-mail in the Sent folder, one read and one unread. But only one copy is received. I am still checking @aim.com, and it does have an advantage in being set up in any mail client.

 

Westside

Could you be so kind and point me to aim.com's IMAP setup URL / guide.
Would like to give the IMAP link a test run.

Thanks

 

Email Program set up for use with AIM Mail
Found it ..
Thanks for your review. Will give my 2 cents worth later in the week.

 

It is very easy if you already have a @netscape.net account.