AOL Mail Down 20 Hours and Counting

[Foolmewunz]

I have a Yahoo mail account but I seldom use it. I might not have the spam filter set up right but I get tons of spam in that account.

At work I used to have Outlook Express which was a very easy email account to use. I liked it. When we switched to MS Office email I, like many of my co-workers, asked to get switched back to Outlook Express. Mostly because the newer program hung up a lot.

??? "MSOffice Email" was "Outlook". Outlook Express was just the free version of Outlook, if I'm not mistaken. I think a lot of people asked to get switched back because people don't like changes and don't want to admit that they're too dumm to figure out the version with better bells and whistles. After using Outlook for years, I could have never gone back to Express. I can't think of a business user who could get by without the functionality of the Calendar, to be honest. I had to work through 150 incoming emails a day and without that drag 'n drop to the calendar my entire morning would've been just dealing with emails. (I was on this side of the ocean and my clients/interests were in the US so around the time we closed for the evening, my "partners" were starting to crank out emails.)

In fact, I cannot fathom why GMail hasn't incorporated a calendar/task list. It's one of the best functions in Outlook. If I was flush, I'd buy Outlook just for having that ability. (No, none of the add-ons work... I've tried them and they screwed up my Chrome so badly that I gave up.)

 

[paulhutch]

https://www.gmail.com/mail/help/tasks/

 

[Foolmewunz]

https://www.gmail.com/mail/help/tasks/

That's a calendar. There are plenty of them out there. I want one that works like Outlook's Calendar. (Pouty face.)

In Outlook, you can right click a message, whether you've read it or not, and move it to an Appointment or a ToDo item. Or you can drag it over to the calendar icon or link/line and drop it and the calendar opens up and asks you where to put it. I haven't found one for GMail that lets you do that.

 

[Drewbot]

AOL LOL

 

[paulhutch]

In Gmail select the email (don't need to open it), then choose the More button and select Add to Tasks. In the Tasks pane that opens, select the task you just created, open it and assign a date. The Task is now shown in your Google calendar named Tasks.

Being a browser neutral system it doesn't use right click or drag and drop. To have right click and drag & drop functionality you can use Mozilla Thunderbird with the Lightning Calendar and set it up to use Gmail/Google Calendar.

 

[Dancing David]

I have a Yahoo mail account but I seldom use it. I might not have the spam filter set up right but I get tons of spam in that account.

At work I used to have Outlook Express which was a very easy email account to use. I liked it. When we switched to MS Office email I, like many of my co-workers, asked to get switched back to Outlook Express. Mostly because the newer program hung up a lot.

Hi,
If you navigate to your browser to mail.office365.com in Chrome it will work well, What does not work well is using it in any IE 8 or 9.

You want to avoid the 'Lite' version if you can.

Now using MS Office Outlook, you should take it off cached mode if you are getting lags, or you can repair your inbox.

 

[kajata]

Maybe the email isn't down and you just used up your 50 free hours of Internet for the month.

 

[Foolmewunz]

In Gmail select the email (don't need to open it), then choose the More button and select Add to Tasks. In the Tasks pane that opens, select the task you just created, open it and assign a date. The Task is now shown in your Google calendar named Tasks.

Being a browser neutral system it doesn't use right click or drag and drop. To have right click and drag & drop functionality you can use Mozilla Thunderbird with the Lightning Calendar and set it up to use Gmail/Google Calendar.

Ah, okay.... primitive, but I may need to play with it. You can't do any "bring forward" to a specific date. It's just a "to do" item. But it's better than trusting my faulty old memory. Outlook would do the same thing with Tasks, but you could create an appointment just by moving a message received today to an appointment on the 5th... if you knew that was when you needed to actually work on it. A task list requires that you look at it every day (a bit of discipline that I guess shouldn't be hard to develop). An appointment would "ding" you thirty minutes before it was due and then on the time it was due. It would also tell you in the early a.m. that you had fourteen items backed up for that day, already.

 

[newyorkguy]

As I mentioned. I still have my AOL mail account and I have some old friends (including a business associate) who -- for some reason -- insist on sending mail to me at AOL no matter how many times I ask them to use my Gmail account. In other words, I still check my AOL Mail every day or two. I often have trouble loading it (in Firefox) and last night I discovered that AOL -- bless their little hearts -- have come up with a new image for when the mail fails to load. (Or at least it's new to me.)

Nice, huh? ​

I also discovered there is a website -- is it down right now? -- that tracks AOL (and other sites) that you can use to determine if it's them not you.

 

[newyorkguy]

This is the Aol Mail error screen I normally get.

​

Doesn't say anything about error, doesn't have to!

 

[ZirconBlue]

They sent floppies (the younger members probably don't even know what those were) before they sent CD's. You could tape over the write protect hole, format them and use them for your own data.

About all you could use the CD's for (assuming you weren't foolish enough to actually install the AOL client) was drink coasters or frisbees.

A friend of mine stitched a bunch of them together into a suit of armor. I think he referred to it as AOLMail, although I was partial to You've Got Maille.

 

[newyorkguy]

I remember at work one of the guys in HR was giving those CDs out. He told me to take "a few." I said I only need one. He said, "You can give them to friends." Maybe. Back in 1998 people liked AOL.

I started using the Internet in 1994 at work. I resisted buying a computer. I remember how excited we were when Windows 95 was about to be unveiled. And I mean unveiled. It was on live TV with Bill Gates. It was a major event. A guy I worked with was totally psyched about it. (It turned out to be the same old crap. Remember, "It is now safe to turn off your computer?" Friend of mine's kid suddenly shut his down. He had to take it to CompUSA and pay a tech $100 bucks to repair it.)

Finally I bought a laptop. My friends asked me, "You online?" I said no. I had email at work. Any documents I needed I'd download to a floppy from my work station. Music? I had a Walkman, thanks. Then I decided... I had to get connected. I used this:

​

 

[bigred]

Shoulda stuck with Prodigy.

 

[jhunter1163]

So, is it back up yet?

 

[elgarak]

Ah, okay.... primitive, but I may need to play with it. You can't do any "bring forward" to a specific date. It's just a "to do" item. But it's better than trusting my faulty old memory. Outlook would do the same thing with Tasks, but you could create an appointment just by moving a message received today to an appointment on the 5th... if you knew that was when you needed to actually work on it. A task list requires that you look at it every day (a bit of discipline that I guess shouldn't be hard to develop). An appointment would "ding" you thirty minutes before it was due and then on the time it was due. It would also tell you in the early a.m. that you had fourteen items backed up for that day, already.

The problem with Outlook is a naming one. There's the server software Outlook, providing an email and enterprise organizing service. And there's the client software Outlook (Express), which provides access to Outlook (server) services, as well as other email accounts.

 

[newyorkguy]

So, is it back up yet?

Oh it's been back up for days. But then it went down again and came back up. Sometimes only for a minute or two. Those times I get a popup message from AOL that says:

Whoops! Sorry, we have encountered an unexpected technical problem. Please exit your account and re-sign back in. Thanks!

AOL is up, it's down, it's...kind of a roller coaster ride.

 

[CORed]

The problem with Outlook is a naming one. There's the server software Outlook, providing an email and enterprise organizing service. And there's the client software Outlook (Express), which provides access to Outlook (server) services, as well as other email accounts.

Actually there are at least two email clients named Outlook. Outlook Express used to come free with Windows, and was overpriced. Outlook (not Express) comes, or used to come with Office and is a pretty good email/calendar/contact application.

 

[elgarak]

Actually there are at least two email clients named Outlook. Outlook Express used to come free with Windows, and was overpriced. Outlook (not Express) comes, or used to come with Office and is a pretty good email/calendar/contact application.

YMMV.

I was working at a university that ran an Outlook email server for the science/teaching staff. I don't know what services they installed -- the only thing available to me was the email. I could access the server just fine from my Mac OS X Mail* client. There was a lot of behind-the-scenes work done by IT after they started the whole thing -- they moved the whole setup to new servers twice, with new addresses and server names, and updated the server software a few times. Each time we would get an instruction email what to change in the client to continue.

The Win Outlook file was several pages long, and covered multiple versions of Outlook and Outlook Express.

The Mac OS X Mail instructions was, at most, one paragraph. Mostly it was "Start up the Mail client."

*The Mac:Office version at the time came with a supposedly functional equivalent to Outlook named Entourage. The recommendation from the university's IT team was "Don't use. If you do, we do not support you." They could have left out the last sentence, though. They didn't give a damn about us Mac users. We still had less email downtime than our Windows colleagues.

 

[Dancing David]

Actually there are at least two email clients named Outlook. Outlook Express used to come free with Windows, and was overpriced. Outlook (not Express) comes, or used to come with Office and is a pretty good email/calendar/contact application.

Outlook Express pretty much went out with XP, now if you Office365, yuo get most of the functions in the web app mail.office365.com, and it can be accessed with MS outlook as well.

 

[sloinker]

We still have AOL. Had it since the late 90's. I like their email and intuitive handling of their screens. Of course we also have a couple other choices. I will continue to use AOL unless there is a reason not to. I use it with a 60mmbp broadband connection. I still have access to dial-up from my sign in screen but since I use VOIP it isn't worth a crap when the broadband fails.

How about Ask Jeeves.......all searches led to porn.