RSSAOL Pushes AIM Mail, Unlimited Storage
By David Worthington | Published June 6, 2005, 12:34 PM
Monday, after months of one-upsmanship between its rivals, America Online will take AIM Mail live along with offering unlimited mail storage for AOL members.. The launch coincides with the general release of the final build of AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) 5.9 ahead of AOL's migration to its next-generation Triton client.
AOL Explorer, an integrated Web browser that was introduced in beta builds, has been notably dropped from the final release.
With the update, AOL has become the first Internet service provider to take the caps off and go unlimited with Web mail. AIM Mail, meanwhile, will be delivered to 22 million active IM users and uses Screen Names as e-mail addresses. AOL has imposed a storage limit of 2 GB for non-members.
Users can access AIM Mail by invoking it through their AIM Buddy List, through the Mail panel located within the AIM Today welcome screen or by visiting AIM.com. In the release, AIM Today is once again a faceless Windows and no longer forces the installation of the AOL Explorer Web browser.
In addition to high storage capacity, AOL has included new search tools to more easily locate messages, as well as spam and antivirus protection. The same spam protection provided to AOL members serves as the backend for AIM Mail with virus protection being provided by McAfee.
The usability enhancements found in AIM Mail are derived from technology acquired from Mailblocks in 2004. They include: rich text for styled e-mail composition; drag and drop capabilities between folders; automatic inbox refreshing and audible new mail notifications. Convenience features including auto-addressing, spell checking and the ability to unsend mail sent to other AOL and AIM mail members are also included.
In addition, AIM presence awareness is prominently placed throughout the service, using AOL's trademark Running Man to signal when friends, family and coworkers are online. Microsoft business unit MSN has already riveted presence into Hotmail.
Users can organize their contacts using an address book that AOL provides. To accommodate the anticipated surge in contacts resulting from AIM Mail, AOL has raised the Buddy List's capacity to 400.
Going beyond to its exposure points in the AIM client software, AOL is providing open e-mail access from third party clients by offering IMAP support. Screen Names are used as a single sign-on for both standard and IMAP services.
As part of a system-wide auto-upgrade, AIM users will be given the option of activating their AIM Mail account. To entice users to sign up for the service AOL is fielding a sweepstakes promotion where it will give away Sony PSPs, T-Mobile Sidekicks, iPod Shuffles and a 2005 Mini Copper S.
"Big storage is a nice to have, but certainly no big need to have right now," remarked Joe Wilcox, a senior analyst with Jupiter Research. "The question is how else AOL might let consumers make use of the storage. E-Mail is one way. But AOL also offers other services, like photos, where big storage might appeal to consumers."
"So today's 'nice to have' could be tomorrows 'I must have,' depending on how AOL chooses to extend storage to its other services," said Wilcox.
Why don't you open free Briefcase like Yahoo Briefcase?
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|This release is actually not bad.
I'm glad they dumped AOL Explorer. I'm also glad they have given out 2GB of storage via email and let you use your AIM buddy name.
I don't use AOL but I do work on people's computers who do. Personally I think AOL used to be junk. The first 2 years I thought they were awesome. Then it went downhill from there. For the last 2 years I think they have begun improving.
AIM does just what it says it will therefore I cannot say it's junk.
Get a grip people. It's just IM software :)
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|What kind of fool would subscribe to AOL dial up service at $23.90 per month; when DSL is now only $14.95??? I got away for them about three years ago and we still get a bunch of their free CDs.
They had just two local access numbers for this entire county. One wouldn't work in some areas unless you paid the phone company's toll charges. A third(secret number) was provided exclusively for the college here. Most people never knew it because it was excluded from AOL's advertisements.
Competitors like MSN had more than ten mumbers in the same area if somebody wants 56k dial up service.
Why is AOL still around? They charge too much money and don't even compete on a level playing field. I ain't goin back either...
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|Heh i rememner back in the 90's when AOL was 19.95 a month for 5 hours and you supposedly had unlimited email then. It was actually limited to 500 messages I do believe from when AO(hel)L 95 was out and what not. That blew up really fast and they changed it like speedmeister said.
AOL is a slowly dying company and it is just a matter of time before it is truely over.
Unlimited email is not what AOL needs to try and give out. What they need is a whole new angle to the services they want to provide. If I want unlimited storage I will use the numerous gmail invites I have in every gmail acct I currently use today. I will encrypt my attachments on there and not worry about anything.
I quit using the AOL client years ago and never looked back. I would not use aol email since all you get is spam. You cant create an email account on aol that will not get spam in less that 30 minutes on their I am convinced of it (tested it). If I could I would block everything related to aol where I work since it is a constant headache.
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|You do understand AOL can't die unless it gets spinned off from Time Warner first right?
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|'AOL sucks ass' could go into a massive essay about it but that somes it up quicker.
AOL you can make my life as an IT Techinican aaaarrrgghhhh
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|so... get this... aol's selling 100 megabytes of email space to its paid customers... advertising in it... and butt raping them all by deleting their emails whenever it wants....
and its giving leeches more space than they can handle for free!!!
SIGN ME UP! IM A FAN OF BEING MOLESTED BY YOUR CORPORATE GREED!
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|I agree to the comment by speedmister !
AOL = Americal Off Line :P
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|Somehow I doubt their "unlimited" mailboxes are going to last. Back in the late 90's when AOL went to $20 a month for their dialup service they didn't keep pace with the increased demand for their service and ended having to reimburse people who weren't able to dial in. Call it 10Gb, 20Gb, or even 100gb mailboxes but to say unlimited is a bit dishonest. Either they have some limits on what one can upload/download which is going to make somebody whine that it isn't "unlimited" or they are going to see a lot of users that cost more than they pay. I am sure there is probably some kid that's going to take that unlimited seriously and try to see how much they can store on AOL's servers before they decide to change their policies. It's a good idea to have bigger mailboxes to stay competitive with the free webmail accounts so that consumers feel that they are actually getting something extra for their money even if they never use it but I think this 'unlimited' idea is going to be something AOl will regret.
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|To make AOL mail "RELEVANT" in free email war (Gooooogle / Yahooooo), must add free pop3 support first.. Also, making some AOL multimedia contents free
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|To make AOL mail "RELEVANT" in free email war (Gooooogle / Yahooooo), must add free pop3 support first.. Also, make some AOL multimedia contents free. Open source winamp etc
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|Don't get too caught up in symantics. When google upped their storage to 2gb they said the program was called "Infinity +1" and I'm pretty sure my inbox on google doesn't have infinite storage space.
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|It has free IMAP support, which is pretty damn nice.
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|The Infinity + 1 idea were an April fool’s joke, and they just set the 2 GB increase at the same time for fun.
That was similar to the Google Gulp page that they had up at the same time.
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|Umm.. Wrong. Infinty +1 was the name of the program.
http://itvibe.com/news/3413/
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