Here is quick way to send large attachments, use AOL!

Why go AOL?

American Online too has come up with choose after ‘@’ kind of email ids. Though the makers claim that they were the first to do it, we know that they dint, Mail.com has been offering this service from ages.

So like the usual MyOwnEmail kind, you have different categories to choose from depending on your interest. If you are interested in music, you can have a cool musically sounding email id and likewise in other fields as well. So if you don’t find your favorite name in other email services, try AOL.

Getting started with AOL :

Once you sign up for an AOL account, you can instantly notify all your friends with the new email id. This you can do by downloading the address book from your older email account. Once all email addresses are copied, AOL automatically notifies them. Added to this feature, the mails you had already received in your older email id will directly be downloaded to the new AOL account. This is done by a service called ‘TrueSwitch’. The service logins to your older account and transfers all emails including attachments to the new AOL account. It not only transfers old emails but also forwards all the new emails you receive in your old account.

Please note : TrueSwitch as independent service charges around 20 dollar/month for same but with AOL, its free.

What is it that AOL offers that is really special ?

The mail service is quite quick (again the AJAX based interface, but not as quickly as Gmail), though you might have server problems quite often. The server is very poor and most of the times you get to see the ‘Try Again’ in your browser. I liked the way they’ve integrated AIM in the service and just like GMail, it saves the chat history too. And one interesting feature is you can also send in text messages to your friends’ mobile phone as well.

The email service currently offers 2GB of space (I hope they increase it, as competitors are offering unlimited space now). However, while sending bigger emails AOL will be one of my recommended service as it is directly interlinked to XDrive, and therefore you can send an attachment of any size (up to 5 Gb). This is done using the XDrive, where your large attachments (up to 5GB) get uploaded there and the link goes to the recipient.

Spam filter is also pretty decent and the medium level filtering identifies almost all spam mails and directs it to the spam folder.

News comes in like in Yahoo, or Windows live on the right end which you can close without leaving the mail interface. But if you are using Firefox, please be careful as it might crash at times, it did happen to me when I tried to catch up with some news.

These are facilities normally found elsewhere too, but here comes the AOL special. You can blog the email you have received in AOL blog space with just one click. The pictures you have received as well can be resize every easily with the click of the mouse. And the next good part is you can have multiple topics and each of them come under different pages. So it’s basically like categories being separated, and you get to visit the category you want to see. If you like to blog your stuff, you will have a ball doing it very easily.

Looking at the rest of the usual stuff, I guess AOL is also in close competition with other email service providers. But probably since it was an exclusive paid service which was later made free has given the notion to its customers that it’s still a paid service. They must resort to better marketing so that the service picks up well.