It's okay. Not my favorite provider, but not as bad as having needles jammed in my eyes. The pages can take a while to load sometimes, but there are a lot of websites like that cluttering up the net. I wouldn't necessarily recommend it as a first choice, but if you can't use Yahoo or Hotmail, it's an acceptable backup. Probably best for newsletters or spam email. I also use it because I have friends on AIM, and it's convenient.

I like the fact that it logs in to AIM while I am checking my mail and I don't even have to have AIM installed, but I also hate the fact that it logs into AIM...double standard...I know, but it slows it down a lot and when it takes more then 15 seconds to move an email...I get pissed.

For testing purposes I had to use a number of the webmail clients including AOL mail fairly heavily for a few weeks.

AOL mail was, by far, the worst of the bunch. It was consistently the slowest to receive mail, and due to not capturing seconds as part of their timestamp, stuff constantly appeared out of order. They actually auto-subscribed me to their own mailing list which apparently has been blacklisted, since I had a marketing message from an AOL affiliate in my Spam inbox upon my very first login.

Their spam filters are pretty aggressive, overall, capturing lots of stuff that's not spam at all. Gmail doesn't have this problem. I should never have to look into my spam folder to make sure real emails haven't been lost. That defeats the point entirely.

The interface is messy, and cluttered with flash banner ads. Possibly worse than the ads are the frequent reminders to use their bullshit extra features like themes, aim, etc. Gmail tells you about new stuff once. AOL tells you about it until you say yes. Heavy-handed choices like that sound great on paper to marketing execs in dying and irrelevant corporations, but are a bad idea in practice.

Finally, the "you've got mail" audio that plays on launch is not nostalgic in a cute way as I expect they believe by virtue of its unnecessary inclusion at login. It is jarring thanks to crappy audio quality, and reminds me personally of the internet circa 1994 when it took forever to do ANYTHING (yes I did have AOL back then), when everyone flamed each other because there was nothing better to do, and the only new people you encountered first asked "ASL?" and then "wanna cyber?"

Thanks, but no thanks for the walk down memory lane.

In summary: Use gmail. If you already use AOL mail, cut your losses and switch to gmail. They have some great contact import / account transition tools available here. You won't look back.

I use my AOL email address that came with having an account for iChat as my "spam" email address. When I need to supply an email address and I suspect I'll be spammed I use this one and it's not because they have a good spam filter either (because Gmail's is better). The reason is that I don't really use AOL mail as I don't like the UI and I find the "You've Got Mail" sound bite an irritating annoyance that is not really needed. Every time I hear it I think of that cheesy romantic comedy with Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks.

This isn't really the email provider for me.

I currently have AOL E-mail, and I could complain about it, but I'm not going to. I've heard people say how rotten AOL is, but yet they jump from one service to the other, apparently not satisfied with any of them. I'll stick with what I have, thank you very much.

AOL is the worst provider out there in my book. The software takes over your computer and downloads hidden files that are very difficult to get rid of. The e-mail as others have mentioned is unreliable. Customer service is not the best and the operator/ techs are hard to understand because they are in another country trying to speak  English but are not doing a very good job because of their accent. The English sounds, well not like English. When you try to cancel service they will turn on you and not want to hear what you have to say. If you switch to cable internet and say I do not need your slow broadband they will eventually say, "if you stay with us we will only charge you only $5.00 per month." I still told them no, I said AOL slows down my cable. They said that is impossible; I said it is true. Anyway, when I finally got all of the AOL junk downloads off of my computer its runs a lot faster. I am very happy with cable internet.

I can only recieve e-mails half the time; I dont know if a good friend has sent an e-mail to me or not, that can screw our friendship up!

It's much easier to access your AOL mail when signed in to AOL. Otherwise, it just seems tedious.

Don't like any part of AOL

While the actual mail section AOL 9.0 is flawless, it's the section on AOL's website that makes me a little angry. Everytime I try to read or delete an email there, I get a message saying my login session has expired - even when I've only been logged in for a minute. This could just be my computer, though.