AOL Announces New Web Email Interface - Oh Goody

I've done nothing but complain about AOL email.  With my issues, I come from a few perspectives:  I want email I can trust & not be inundated with ads.  Yet I can't say that about AOL email.  First, let me present to you the press release from Time Warner, the parent company of AOL:

AOL's Products and Technologies Group today announced the launch of an enhanced version of AOL Web Mail that offers users one-click access to Gmail, Yahoo! Mail and a variety of third-party sites and destinations directly from the AOL Web Mail page, http://mail.aol.com. Over the past year, AOL has added more than 30 new features and a variety of new functionality to Web Mail in an effort to make it more open to third-party content and to offer more monetization opportunities to advertisers. The new version is being released globally, making it available in more than 38 countries and locales around the world.

Back to my rant:

I've experienced email that's been actively blocked, even from my spam folders.  That's happened numerous times in the last few months.  They're usually confirmation emails, that both Yahoo and Gmail receive within seconds of signing up.  Hmm.

I also don't want to be bothered with AIM or dragging my personal information into AOL itself.  Yet it keeps taking up 1/3 of my email screen everytime I login. 

There's a reason I have different providers and a reason I use and maintain a password schedule.  Having AOL be my central point for "all things email" just sounds like an interesting way to consolidate your competition into one spot and try to slide customers your way.  It reminds me of bloggers who quote content from other popular blogs to try and generate their own traffic based ad revenue off the same subject matter.  They are called scrappers.  AOL a scrapper?

I like my security, I like my privacy.  That's why I don't share my info, why I don't let online services "remember" my passwords and what not.  Yet my woes and my own personal concerns may be just that, something only I have an issue with.

Time Warner further reported that with 48 million users, their email service was the 2nd most popular free e-mail service.  They clumped that statistic from all of AOL proprietary email, AOL.COM Mail and AIM Mail users.  Interesting padding.  Don't you love how you tweak numbers to make you look good.  I can say I'm the No. 2 ranked Alexa site!  Or more accurately, Google is ranked No. 2, and the services I use, and hence provide to you, of theirs are an extension of them. 

So maybe my web woes are just my own.  Maybe you aren't so critical of missing email.  Or why I prefer Gmail now a days. And maybe I'm too hyper-sensitive about paying for AOL e-mail services and still suffer the advertising footers.  Am I too picky about my daily error message from AOL? (web woes).  Or that I didn't like how it SEEMED I had no options when it came to upgrading AOLVR.  (See my prefer Gmail link above.)  Actually that post is from October.  That's how long I've seen these error message.

Well, maybe this is my last AOL rant.  (I've said that before, haven't I?)  But then again, I keep getting errors.  Maybe they've seen my rants and that's why I get error messages.  Who knows.  If you've happened upon this article and say, I know what he's talking about, well then, you're not alone.


source: time warner press release

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