AOL has almost always offered a free email account. It was the dial up connection they charged for and other services. They were the biggest and best for many years. If they could have come up with faster connection speeds with dial up then they would have maybe kept that up.

I still have the $9.95 a month service for now because my dad is using… when he tires of it I will drop it.

AOL had it’s problems but so did all others.

What you want to do is not easy, will not be free, and probably will not work flawlessly.

If your emails are downloaded into Outlook or some other desktop email application, you are fine as you stand. Do some research on how to back up those files, drop aol, and continue on with your new email account provider.

If your emails reside inside AOL itself, within the software they provide, I am not aware of any mass export software for their emails. I have heard differing information from users on how long AOL stores messages, what format they are in, what services they offer, etc. As a result, it is impossible to give step by step instructions.

That being said, my steps would be as follows:
Sign up for IMAP access with AOL, this hopefully is an add-on they can provide to your email for a fee.

Once IMAP is setup, setup and configure your computer to use any IMAP desktop email application you desire aside from Outlook. This could be Apple Mail on Mac, which is free, or Thunderbird on the Mac and PC, which is free. You will only be using it temporarily.

Connect this new email application to your AOL IMAP account, sync your messages with the setting to store a copy on your computer.

Cancel all services with AOL.

Sign up for a free gmail account, or any other email provider that offers IMAP service.

Configure and connect whatever desktop application you chose to use to connect to gmail through their IMAP protocols.

Sync your stored copies of your older AOL message up to your IMAP email service provider.

You should now have all your old AOL email residing within your new email service provider. You can rely on them for your storage, and disable the setting to store a local copy of your emails, or you can keep that setting on, which will keep one copy of your email on your email providers servers, and one copy on your computer.

They key is if AOL offers IMAP, and how far back they will be able to access your emails.

Hope that helps.

I get a lot of spam, but none to my inbox, it just gets filtered out by gmail. Maybe a few a year slip by, once, and then gmail learns,

I would suggest that you simply POP right into gmail, or better yet, use IMAP since it is a much more flexible protocol. You could then change your reply-to header to that of your yahoo account and no one will see that it came from gmail. Aside from those looking at headers, which is not something automated spam trollers are going to do.

I used to be an email server admin, handing systems of hundreds of thousands of users, 10′s of millions of messages delivered per day, and 100′s of millions of connections per day. If I had to do it all over again, I would never deploy my own hardware and software, but use Google Apps for Domains, which is just gmail that allows you to connect a domain to it.

The only reasons I would not use Gmail/Apps is if policy dictated that I would not be allowed to for personal privacy reasons. The amount of storage they give, size of file allowed to send is higher than any other, and paid accounts are even higher. Overall costs are significantly lower than running your own setup.

In short, I am nothing but happy with spam filtering in gmail. They publish their CIDR blocks for their email servers on the web, and also keep current and up to date SPF.

Yahoo has their own internal blocklists, with a ridiculous block first, ask questions later policy. This means any new email server it sees is blocked, and you have to fill out paperwork and forms and tests just to be able to send email to their users. Their RBL’s are out of date, have known good blocks in them, and some of the dirtiest pools in the world are allowed yet “we can’t explain why due to internal security reasons”.

The keyword blocking is the worse, as they don’t do a standards compliant rejection bounce, but instead “eat” the email. You have no way of knowing the recipient got the message or not. The amount of email that were were losing to “never shows up” cases made them impossible to work with. Finally, we just paid money to be put on a whitelist. Keep in mind, anyone could have paid, less was asked of us than when we tried to open initial connection access to them when bringing on a 2rd, 4th, 5th, to nth server.

For your export/import needs, the only thing I can think of is IMAP. You would need to enable IMAP on both accounts, and then simply copy from one account to the other. I have done this many times in the past, usually with Thunderbird because it has a plug-in called “Duplicates” that does a lightning fast scan of my multi-hundred thousand email archive and makes sure nothing went wrong, including that there are no dupe messages compared by an all message MD5.

If yahoo does not offer IMAP, they may offer it if you pay them for a pro style account. If they still have no IMAP offering, I hope you have all your messages stored on their server in POP. Bring it down in one go and tell the remote to delete after download. It’s the risky way, but may be your last option.

Try to find an IMAP option, it will be the smoothest for sure.

Many of us need a Gmail address for our Android phones. I set it up so it POPs my mail to and from a Yahoo account (where I can block spammers and wackos). I never give out my Gmail address to anyone.

My parents have had AOL for years. They also have had high speed internet from their cable company for a long time now. My brother is telling my mother to stop aol, but she is nervous. The 2 most important things she cares about is keeping her email address, which I see from above you can do, and secondly, using the AOL email browser. Will she still be able to use the AOL browser and email browser? Also, how does one go about cancelling it? Is there a number or you do it online? You also have to tell them explictly that you want to keep the email, right?

Thanks a lot.

Steven

Now I am tired of using it because they tack an advertising message on the end of each email and it looks unprofessional.

I have a registered domain and want to use that for my email address. I am trying to find out how to receive and read email without using AOL or Outlook. A Google search got me to this page, but I don’t see the answers.

According to AOL, you can keep your AOL email address even if you quit paying.

http://daol.aol.com/mailmessaging/email

My only suggestion would be to locate the pages on aol.com where they state they offer free email, You can then use archive.org to go back in time and look at that page on any specific date.

It is called The WayBack Machine, which can be found here: http://www.archive.org/

The fact you got anything back is amazing. You could also try asking your credit card company to chargeback the most recent ones, depending on your terms and if you were paying with a credit card.