Options to leave AOL as email provider

[Red Horse]

Well after losing all my new e-mails and old emails for second time in a little over a year. Ithink its time to cut the 15-20yr old cord. they restored stuff first time and I went on ine with them a week ago to get latest restored-they sid 3-days-still hasn't happened. and by the way, I had to sign upagainfor their "tech support" at 4.99amo. to get anywhere.

My biggest concern is I have a lot of emails saved in folders (they were not lost) but as these are saved in AOL'sserver I'm told you have no way to save these toa memory stick or other device.

In any case,what is best option out there- gmail? applemail etc?? I want easiest way to keep my old contacts out there with autoforwarding of stuff from AOL.

Opinions?

 

[ericm979]

Forwarding depends on AOL not the new provider. You may be out of luck there. Most ISPs don't do it.... it's not in their interest to make it easy for you to leave, and it costs them some processing on each email.

Gmail works well and their spam filtering is good.... but they read all your email in order to learn more about you to sell you ads. I use gmail for work (company selected). For personal use I ran my own mail server for a long time. But I was spending a lot of time working on spam filtering either adding new software or writing my own. So I gave up and started using dreamhost. They don't read your email to sell you ads, but they're also not free like gmail is. But probably cheaper than aol. Most people use gmail these days and either don't know or don't care about them scanning their mail.

With both of those I use IMAP mail readers so I'm not stuck using their web interfaces, which generally suck. It's a bit tricky to set up for Dreamhost as they're too cheap to buy real SSL certificates. Using your own mail reader also makes it easy to archive your mail locally. That way you're not depending on the ISP to keep backups, but you have to.

 

[Sigarms]

For work, I use G-mail.

For personal, I used Yahoo. Doing voluenteer work using my yahoo account was getting more and more troublesome for various reasons (big one contact list). A couple of guys in scouts I donate time with used yahoo and were experiening the same issues I had.

I switched my yahoo personal account to a personal g-mail account, no complaints and forwhatever reason, like it better than the Yahoo.

That said, didn't import all my contacts as most of my personal stuff per e-mail is gun related anyways and anyone important enough to me personally I have thier phone number.

We do not use ANY cloud services whatsoever, which apparently can impact importing contacts from one host to another (what I gather, not smart enought to know that for a fact).

 

[kcflhrc]

I had no idea AOL was even still around. G-Mail is my choice

 

[ovrszd]

I had no idea AOL was even still around. G-Mail is my choice

Me neither.

G-Mail.

 

[EverythingAttachments]

Gmail works great for me! It has to be the most popular by a long shot.
Travis

 

[TheMan419]

I like gmail as well. Yes it reads your emails to serve advertising. However, apparently, you can import all your old AOL emails and contacts....

How to Import AOL Messages and Contacts Into Gmail

I have no idea if that worked, but I literally just googled "How do I import AOL emails and contacts into gmail".

 

[jajiu]

I use MSN for my mail and I also have a couple of gmail accounts but use MSN for most of my mail and have had no problems.

 

[/pine]

There is the option of not using anybody...i.e., use a personal mail client...(like Outlook, Eudora, Thunderbird etc., etc...)

You can use whomever your ISP is for sending/receiving mail... most decent e-mail clients will archive the messages... that can easily be stored on thumb drives or disk media (CD, DVD etc)...

 

[Red Horse]

Thanks guys for all the comments... Looks like a rain/snow day project.