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AOL Mail Down 20 Hours and Counting

newyorkguy

Penultimate Amazing
newyorkguy
Joined
Mar 12, 2013
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Location
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I guess this is more a 'Dog bites man' story than a 'Man bites dog' story but AOL Mail has crashed. Hard.

Bad news, everyone. Your email address from the nineties isn’t working right now. Aol Mail has been down since early this morning. We’ve reached out to get more information, but have so far not heard back. According to Aol’s DownDetector the service has been having issues since 4:10 AM EST. Aol Mail’s twitter handle has been flooded with users complaining they cannot connect. As of right now, the service is MIA. News link
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That's a good way to describe it. Email address from the 1990s. That's why I've maintained mine. Sentimental. Yet a few friends and acquaintances still insist on using it despite me telling them, "I'm on Gmail now." The outage was reported at 4:10 a.m EST? That's twenty hours. Here's what I saw when I logged on:

[I was going to post a screen cap of a page of code but guess what? It just came back up!]
 
In 1997 half of all the American homes that had Internet access had it through AOL. Three years later the AOL-Time Warner merger took place. In many business history courses it's known as, 'the worst business merger of all time.'

Merger highlights include-
  • During negotiations AOL inflated it's ad revenues and then, of course, underperformed once the merger took place.
  • In the wake of the merger, Time Warner's biggest shareholder Ted Turner lost 80% of his net worth, about $8 billion. He has said it appears to be the biggest individual loss of all time.
Been quite a ride.
 
Drs_Res said:
It's a company that used to send, via snail mail, drink coasters in the form of CDs.
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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.
 
CORed said:
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.
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Or weapons. I thought I was the only one re-using those AOL floppies.

Mrs carlito still has her aol mail. If it ain't broke, I guess.
 
AOL still has over 2 million subscribers, many still connecting via dial-up. Despite the jeering they endure many use it for a very good reason. Where they live, as this Chicago Magazine article from last August explores, there are no alternatives (or very few).

But as someone said, when it comes to email anything is better that Outlook Express. ;)
 
I get my broadband through AOL. Happy with the speed and price I pay. It'd be daft to change because people might jeer.
 
Using an AOL mail address can be stressful nowadays. Users get defensive. This is Derreck Johnson from Slate:
Let’s be clear: I wasn’t using dial-up during the George W. Bush presidency. My modem was in a box in the garage with a bunch of 8-track tapes. But AOL.com, with its simple, clean Web interface was still my preferred method of email retrieval. Yes, I grabbed a Gmail account like everyone else, but it was just to say that I had one. Link
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One person who stuck with AOL as his preferred email wrote that on job interviews, just to be on the safe side, he'd give his Gmail address. I can see that. ;)
 
newyorkguy said:
AOL still has over 2 million subscribers, many still connecting via dial-up. Despite the jeering they endure many use it for a very good reason. Where they live, as this Chicago Magazine article from last August explores, there are no alternatives (or very few).

But as someone said, when it comes to email anything is better that Outlook Express. ;)
Click to expand...

Fie upon thee, villain! WebTV is worse. If you live two hundred years, you'll never see anything as shameful, pitiful, and embarrassing as WebTV.
 
I think my yahoo address is 20 years old. Always stuck with them because their spam filter was pretty good.

And I hate MS, so hotmail was just out of the question. ;)
 
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.
 
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