AOL Mail To Be Accessible Via IMAP

jfruhlinger writes "News.com.com is reporting that AOL's e-mail service, long accessible only via AOL's proprietary, monolithic app, will be available via IMAP starting Thursday. The story notes that this is part of a series of initiatives from AOL to move content beyond its walled garden and into standards-based formats such as HTML and IMAP that any Internet app can access. Supposedly a 'a dramatically different direction' for Netscape is in the works, too."

Anti-spam

[essreenim]

Good news for spam prevention measures..

Re:And the best IMAP Client is...

[Anonymous Coward]

Omar Shahine, one of the primary developers of IMAP support in Microsoft Entourage says "Thunderbird is an almost perfect IMAP client for Windows. If you use IMAP, this is the product for you. [msdn.com]" The only thing ranked higher is his own Entourage. Coming from someone at Microsoft, that's pretty high praise.

It's always been accessible

[OctaneZ]

Just not published:
imap.uk.aol.com
supports SSL/TSL and everything

Re:what speed

[blackmonday]

I know this was meant as a joke, but isn't this the first major IMAP implementation by a large consumer ISP? I don't think I can do IMAP through yahoo, or even my hosting company's email system. Does Apple's .mac do this?

Hooray!

[b1t r0t]

Now if I just had a way to get my 8+ year old e-mails out of that stupid AOL "file cabinet" database and into my home IMAP server along with my other old e-mails.

There are apparently people out there who can get things out of file cabinet DBs, but they charge money to do it. If anybody knows of publically available documentation for that damn database file format, please post a link to it.

Re:And the best IMAP Client is...

[mocktor]

...which is good but relies on SGI's FAM [sgi.com] which itself relies on a heap of other stuff. Definitely not for the faint of heart.

Nitpick

[AaronStJ]

From the summary: "AOL's e-mail service, long accessible only via AOL's proprietary, monolithic app." However, AOL's mail has been avilable form the web for a long time (albeit using a Java app, as I recall.) http://webmail.aol.com [aol.com]

Re:Unofficial AOL Email FAQ

[hsidhu]

From the Unofficial AOL Email FAQ:

AOL's step-by-step instructions of AOL account setup in various popular email programs include:

Microsoft Outlook Express 6
Microsoft Outlook 2000
Microsoft Outlook 2002/2003
Microsoft Entourage
Qualcomm Eudora

I know that setting up email client is trivial to people here on /. but when will these companies start including open source clients in the quasi "approved list" of email client. I mean if you look at the FAQ it does not mention any approved clients, but when the fail to mention viable alternatives such as Thunderbird or even the Mozilla mail client are they telling their customers to only use the "commercial" clients.

This has always irked me, when ever a compnay puts up a FAQ or a how-to to use their services with other products they always just mention commercial/for pay products and never ever mention open source products.

WHY is that?

Just a thought: May be they don't want their customers in the habit of using free as in beer/speech products.

Re:Finally

[spronk]

It's funny you chose "finally" as yoru subject line. The IMAP interface was in beta when I left the company over 2 years ago. At that time it didn't implement any IMAP features and instead provided a POP3 interface over the IMAP port so that marketing could call it an IMAP server.

Let's hope it's progressed since then!

Re:They Could Do THis All Along

[silicon not in the v]

Yahoo POP3 access is available to all, [sourceforge.net] thanks to SourceForge!

They just got a way to make the proper submissions through the Yahoo web interface for your POP3 client to retrieve mail through their utility. Yahoo mail is sweet. I have used it for several years, and it has these excellent things going for it:
I have been able to keep that email address through 3 different ISPs so I don't have to keep changing my email address.
Since they are free, I just have a separate one for junk stuff only, so I can give that one out wherever I want, and I just check up on it a couple times a week to see if there's anything I want.
They have a really good spam filtering system built in. It goes into a Bulk Mail folder and doesn't count against your space quota, so you can take a look in case they mis-filtered something.
It's accessible everywhere without having to set up a mail client to access it.

Re:And the best IMAP Client is...

[WuphonsReach]

I've tried IMAP with Thunderbirrd 0.4 and FuseMail.com...

I wasn't impressed. I was hoping for a Outlook/Exchange type setup where I could work seamlessly off-line, periodically synchronizing with my IMAP folders up on the FuseMail server. Instead, I found the following bugs:

- going off-line, loading a bunch of messages into a folder, and then syncronizing with the IMAP server resulted in a loss of those messages. I had to be online with the IMAP server in order to load new messages into the folder.

- threading on an IMAP folder is horrid. Everything was out of order or highlighted incorrectly (as opposed to a regular POP3 mailbox folder which works 99% fine).

So I'm a bit gun-shy of IMAP at the moment.

Re:And the best IMAP Client is...

[rishistar]

Yeah I had that as well. Am using Mozilla until Thunderbird 1.0 comes out for that very reason. Hopefully it'll be fixed by then (well it may all be sorted out now but I got fed up of shifting mailboxes over!)