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AOL Takes on Rivals with Free Web Mail

By David Worthington, BetaNews

December 23, 2004, 1:40 PM

America Online is currently beta testing a refresh of AOL Mail on the Web in preparation for a rollout of its own free Web mail service to the masses early next year. The Mail on the Web beta went live late Wednesday with a new user interface and several performance enhancements.

The new Web mail service features rich text, drag and drop capabilities between folders and automatically refreshes the inbox so users can view new mail in real time. Eventually, AOL will make the service presence aware with AOL Instant Messenger Integration.

At present, AOL Mail on the Web is only available to AOL subscribers and limits storage to 100MB per screen name. Competitors MSN and Google offer 250MB and 1GB, respectively.

Ultimately, AOL's goal is to ramp up its portal strategy. The AOL.com portal site has undergone a planned redesign that introduced content feeds placed prominently alongside Internet search and links to popular AOL.com destinations.

Recently, AOL debuted Search Snapshots, a new video service, as well as its SingingFish media search engine to a wider Internet audience outside of its walled garden of subscribers.

Add a Comment (8 Comments)

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By rpavl

posted Dec 24, 2004 - 11:39 AM

AOL is still AOL...a bogus loser of an organization.

Score: 0

By Djarum

edited Dec 24, 2004 - 2:39 PM

Yes, I assume that's why they have more paying subscribers than the population of most countries. Because after all... who cares, right?

AOL catching up to compete with hotmail yahoo and gmail is a great idea that will get them out to a new audience. Good plan in any (knowledgable) person's opinion when you consider the marketing and economic aspects of it.

Score: 0

By tojfs63

posted Dec 24, 2004 - 8:08 PM

AOL is just trying to catch onto the higher meg email services like yahoo and google. Yahoo offers 250 mgs free to anyone and gmail you have to have an invite. I never really liked gmail because of its lack of notification features. Now at least the aol web mail service is more palatable than in its previous incarnation.

Score: 0

By Al3s0LuTe

posted May 16, 2005 - 11:04 PM

Score: 0

By Al3s0LuTe

edited May 16, 2005 - 11:05 PM

Score: 0

By ApocalypseXP

posted Dec 26, 2004 - 2:11 AM

I hate to add to flaming, but you guys are right. I am an AOL user, and I have never been happy with the service. Too bad they are losing me to broadband DSL in a matter of days... for half of the price, mind you. AOL software in the early days was meant to be intuitive for non-computer literate people to be able to use easily, but in recent days, this has changed greatly. With the addition of the latest build of AOL 9.0, the software has become quite counterintuitive in design and function, and ever more troublesome. Lest we forget the memory hog that the application itself is. Even those with AOL broadband service have to have the AOL client program loaded and signed on just to make use of the internet. What's the point? Go pay less, and get more from Bellsouth, Roadrunner, or just about any other provider. AOL is the most expensive service around. You say it gives you unique content, not otherwise available? Think again. Everything on AOL is based off of other sources, and is accessible from any internet connection, just do a Google search. That's all. Good-bye AOL.

Score: 0

By 12voltman

edited Dec 27, 2004 - 2:06 AM

I am wondering how the peope who say that aol is so great can argue them laying off over 1500 people in the past three months, and losing an average of about 1 million customers a quarter ???

The days of AOL are over. They suck, always have and always will ...

Score: 0

By maoge

posted Mar 12, 2005 - 7:57 PM

AOL is gone, it's history.

www.du168.net

Score: 0

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