AOL Mail 1

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.