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.

From everything I have read and heard from others, you should be able to cancel your AOL account and still keep your aol.com email address. This is in part because AOL now offers free email as a service, just like gmail and yahoo and hotmail.

I have heard a number of different methods for accomplishing this. If you read the post just above yours, there is a link to a google search that may be a good place to get you started.

From what I understand, you will login to your AOL account, and change your account settings from a paid account to a free account. At that point, you should be able to still access your email by logging into aol.com.

I really do not think there is anything you need to do. Your master email address will be maintained for you. I had AOL 17 years ago, and still to this day use that same username for AOL Instant Messenger. Just for kicks I used that login and password at aol.com to login to web email, and it worked.

I would for certain call on the phone to confirm this process, but all reports are that it is simple, and with the free email that AOL now offers, an automatic process.

I can offer you one suggestion. While Comcast will indeed give you a free email account, and you will have the ability to create several more email accounts within your Comcast account, don’t do it. You will be getting yourself in the same boat you are in now.

Take these possible scenarios if you choose to use the Comcast email address. Comcast is going through a company name change, to Xfinity. This happened once before, years ago they were called home.com. They told everyone that they would maintain the @home.com email addresses, but it took only a year, before they were entirely phased out, and everyone had an emil address of @comcast.net.

Comcast may be one of the few games in town now, but as technology marches on, fiber optic may be an option to you, or you may find that DSL has prices and speeds that better suit your use, or perhaps cellular based wireless becomes a new means of getting internet at home.

Any of those reasons will require you to move to a new ISP, Comcast is not going to allow you to take your email address with you, or keep it active if you are not paying them.

As to what will prevent AOL from deleting your emails, nothing. You should backup your emails before you make this call to AOL. There is no guarantee that they do not have a system failure that may accidentally delete your emails. Backup is imperative.

The problem is, backup of AOL emails is not particularly simple. While you still are paying for your account, I would use Apple Mail, in IMAP mode, to download your sent and received emails. From there, you can cancel your account, which will terminate your ability to use IMAP. AOL does not give away access to email outside of web based email. Once you have your emails inside of Apple Mail, you can then change your settings in Apple Mail, to use gmail instead. Now all your AOL emails have been migrated into one place, all in gmail.

Gmail is the only free email provider I am aware of that offers as much free storage, as large a limit on file attachments, and POP as well as IMAP access to your email.

Good luck, I hope it all works out for you.

You can maintain your free aol.com email address, and cancel your aol.com account.

I would strongly suggest that you get a gmail account, and move away from aol. However, some people like aol’s email. I find it sorely lacking and the storage space and options they give you are paltry in comparison to what is being offered by the competition.

I think the best thing to do is start reading any of these posts, which will walk you through canceling aol, and keeping your email address.

One other thing you can do, is pay for one more month, you should then have access to a auto-reply feature, in which you can tell all incoming emails, that you have a new gmail address. Or, keep your aol account, stop paying them, and check in on it once a week. Tell those people to update their address books.

There is a chance aol offers forwarding on free accounts, I doubt it though.

Good luck, and I hope you get out from the month to month that aol is getting you for. Heck, you could donate that month to month to this site ha ha

If you don’t mind me asking, what is it that you like about it that you are willing to pay for? You mentioned email, which is now a free offering from AOL. You should immediately convert your email account to one of the free ones, so it is no longer tied to your account. This way, if anything does ever happen to your account, you will always have access to your email data.

So that covers email, which will get you to a zero cost situation for sending, receiving, and storing email. Outside of that, what other offerings does AOL have that you find is worth the monthly fee?

Do keep in mind, email with AOL can be somewhat dangerous. I have heard if you allow too much time to pass without logging in and checking email, your email account can be erased.

If possible, you may want to hook up Apple Mail to your AOL account, or set up gmail as a man in the middle to AOL, collecting your email, so you always have a local backup in Apple Mail, or a remote backup in Google’s “cloud”. This should protect you from any data loss.

What will you do in 2 years when aol is out of business, and you need one of those emails, but you can not open the app, since there is no server to connect to?

I am glad it works for you, but for our users, there is no way I can recommend they use something like this. You can just use gmail, setup IMAP, and the emails are on your own computer, in .eml format, which has been readable by any email client on the planet for the last 20 years.

Thank you for your comments.

Gmail is pretty top notch, and you get a lot with it for free as well. They have their rough edges as well, but they are certainly the lesser of two evils.

Thanks for the comments.

Why is this not a bigger story
How many uninformed victims are paying $300 a year because they don’t understand what they are paying for at AOL?
Basically this sums it up!
1. AOL Dial-up service
2. McAfee
3. Customer service

I’ve been on high-speed internet for years.

I hate McAfee so much I have their removal tool on my favorites

http://download.mcafee.com/products/licensed/cust_support_patches/MCPR.exe

I started looking at AOL because their service is so crappy, but that’s a tirade for another day.
You certainly don’t loose your email account and as far as I can see you don’t even have to give up the original website (that was my concern, I was just so used to using it after 14 years)
I am going to start moving my important email contacts to my yahoo or gmail email and start phasing out AOL.
They have got to GO!
SPREAD THE WORD
STOP THE MADNESS!

AOL probably has a revenue stream from people just like you, who have not had any issues yet, so had no reason to look into it. They also make a good deal of money from people who no longer use the service, and just do not know to stop paying, because they think AOL is “the internet”.

And btw, AOL is completely wacky, now they aren’t deleting the emails off their server, or maybe it’s more random about it, either way, not good for me.

Can’t envision AOL existing too much more in future? Where is their revenue stream coming from?

Sorry for the delay!

First, pick a free email provider, I like to recommend gmail. Mainly because there is no lock in. They allow you to do forwarding, reply-to customization, custom domains, and IMAP.

The key to those things being valuable is that it allows you to use gmail in the web, or on desktop app. This gives you the ability to use gmail, but also download all your mail to your desktop as well. If they ever get a little overbearing, no matter, you have your email on your computer, as well as in gmail.

You need to be in ownership of your data, as you have learned with AOL. With gmail, you can store it wherever you want.

For your .mac replacement. It seems you want remote backup, and a photo sharing tool. With that, you want it to be transparent and simple.

Drop .mac, and look into DropBox, I can not say enough good things about it. Dropbox is a small menu application, that puts a folder on your mac called Dropbox, whatever you put in it, is backed up to their system.

It is free for 2GB, there are pay models as well. What is nice, is there is no learning curve. If you know how to put a file in a folder, that is all you need to know to use DropBox.

What is also nice is they store revisions, if you accidentally delete a file on your computer, just login to DropBox on the web, and you can restore it. You can do more than restore just the file, you can restore a particular revision of the file.

If you use more than one computer, this is where DropBox really shines, as you just install it on more than one computer. Then, whatever is in your DropBox, will be mirrored to all your other computers as well.

Finally, you use it as a way to share files as well. There is a Public part to dropbox, anything you put in there, can be shared to others. This means, if you have photos, you can drop them in your DropBox, and it will auto build you a photo gallery.

It s not the most sophisticated photo gallery, but for how simple it is, there is nothing else like it. You just put photos in a folder on our mac, and you are done.

If you need more comples photo storage, I would suggest you just update to the newest IPhoto and use Flickr.

DropBox can be coaxed into being used to host websites, it is not really what it is intended for, but it does work.

There are also .mac/mobile me clones out there, who offer the same service, at less of a fee, and probably work a little faster.

It is hard for me to push you in a direction for a good place for websites, since I do not know your specific needs.

Hope that helps.

Now, a word about .mac. The only reason I purchased a .mac account was for iDisk storage(mostly for work) & the ease of the MAC interface. Uploading to the iDisk with any file that is larger than 100MB seems to take forever. It’s highly inefficient & I’m beginning to think, like you, that it’s a waste of money. So where are those user friendly sites where I could a) have a remote storage option(safe) & b) a place to design a website for family/friend photos/files/ etc. In other words, to emulate what .mac gives me, hopefully with the same ease of use. OSX friendly, not only suited for PC users. Thank you.

You should also, at that point, take a look at this site http://www.aolsucks.org/cancel.htm there are numbers and advice there that should help you get through it.

Keep at it, do not let them push you around.