Before you start reading, I would like you to re-read the title and realise that I did mean to put a bit of emphasis on the word “new”. Yeah, I am going to narrate the experience I recently gained just after my previous post on the “all new aol mail” was published.
I am not quite sure if my blog has yet been indexed by the giant search engines, still, here I am, got a mail from one of the product managers of the AOL Mail team who somehow found my previous post here. He wrote to me regarding my thoughts about the all new AOL Email. Eventually I told him that I had lost masnun@aol.com and this kind man promised to look into the fact. Guess what, he made another AOL staff find out the real reason behind the termination of my account. That’s not all, he also made that staff reserve “masnun@aol.in” for me. I was more than happy to get such a pleasant surprise gift from a stranger with whom I haven’t had a live chat yet, just a few emails those we exchanged remain the only links between us. I made the decision immediately then. I am going to keep an AOL account side by side with Gmail. People who are barking mad out there complaining about AOL Customer Care should try a bit to understand the significant difference between the “old aol” and the “new aol”.
This kind guy is a product manager of the Rich Internet Application (RIA) project of AOL that I haven’t yet tested but am dying to test given that the cool screen shots I saw was really eye-candy. RIA requires Microsoft’s SilverLight technology. I need to install the plugin. Unfortunately, I don’t yet have Win XP SP2. With my SP2-less XP, I can not test the product that many people believe, is going to be the future of email messaging. I am still to wait about a week to upgrade my PC before upgrading it’s softwares. But till then, I am using the standard version of AOL Mail.
Features I like:
·········# The interface is nice.
·········# The sidebar with plugins.
·········# Integrated AIM.
·········# Send your AIM presence in outgoing email messages.
·········# Check Yahoo! Mail and Gmail from AOL Mail (Gmail plugin doesn’t work ATM, but I was told that they will work on it)
·········# UNLIMITED STORAGE.
·········# Free POP3 and IMAP support.
·········# Reading Pane.
·········# Themes.
·········# Linking Screen Names provide you the opportunity to switch between accounts on the fly.
·········# Nice Mobile Version.
Things I dislike:
·········# Banner ads rotate over time even if you don’t move.
·········# The rotating ads often cause problems to GUI.
·········# Ads in Email footer.
·········# Takes a bit speedy connection for the standard version. AOL needs to be faster.
Few Tips For Slow Connection Users:
·········# Uncheck the option to automatically sign in to AIM.
·········# Activate Reading pane. It’ll help you read messages without facing GUI problems because of the rotating ads.
These two actions helped me improve the performance of AOL Mail Standard for me.
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