Friday, November 16, 2007

AOL Now Supports POP Mail!

I don't recall exactly how I noticed this, but today (November 16, 2007) I realized that America Online email now supports the POP email protocol. After 15 years, AOL finally supports the most common email standard!

(AOL started offering IMAP support in 2004, and we've been accessing our AOL accounts using Apple Mail, after using AOL Communicator and Claris Emailer - we haven't actually used an AOL application in a decade.)


There seems to be surprisingly little about this the Web, perhaps because the geeky masses long ago forsook AOL as a provider. I did find this interesting forum posting from June 2007 where the poster includes a transcript of an online chat with an AOL tech in which the tech denies AOL has POP support, but instructions for setting up an email client for an AOL POP server are on AOL Help Pages. So I guess this rolled out quietly since June 2007.

My wife and I (as well as many friends) have had our AOL email addresses for over 15 years - and now that it's free to maintain an AOL email account, we have no intention of getting rid of them.

What's important to me about AOL's finally supporting POP:
  • I can now maintain all my email accounts from many different providers (including AOL) from within Gmail - my email "application" of choice for two years now.
  • I no longer have to use an IMAP client on my Palm (or any other mobile device) to check my AOL account when mobile. I'd had to use an IMAP client for this single task.

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