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AOL Gripes America OnLine is the most popular on-line service

Griping about America OnLine is like stealing candy from a baby, so easy as not to be sport. To someone in the gripe field, it's low hanging fruit. This web page is one of the longer ones on the site, though not by design. In fact, I tried hard to restrain myself, limiting the gripes here to articles in the media. My gripes on this page are a result of doing tech support for friends and family running AOL. I was an AOL customer from 1995 thru 1999 but none of the gripes here are from that time period. Fortunately for AOL, I didn't have this web site back then as customers during that period suffered through brutal problems with busy signals when trying to log on. 

PC World magazine rated AOL as the worst tech product of all time. The 25 Worst Tech Products of All Time by Dan TynanMay 26, 2006

Gripes on this page:  AOL and Censorship,  Spam,  Email,  AOL Version 9,  AOL Version 8,  Price Hikes,  AIM,  Canceling and  Assorted Gripes

Note: This page was getting too large, so some older gripes have been moved to another page. Topics there are: AOL Getting Sued, Security, They hate AOL, AOL Version 6, Installing AOL Version 5, Installing AOL Version 6, AOL version 7, AOL Plus (DSL service),  AOL TV and Assorted Gripes. 

"My best advice for any software coming from any part of AOL is to use extreme caution. Or better still, simply avoid it altogether."  Fred Langa. March 19, 2001 

AOL Madness (Warn Your Friends) by Fred Langa in his newsletter the Langa List. April 19, 2004. Quoting: "AOL is at it again. This time, it's reading *inside* its members' emails, and preemptively blocking any messages that contain links to sites that AOL doesn't want you to see ... AOL is parsing the content of its members' emails and blocking them even if they merely *mention* a site that AOL disapproves of." 

Fred Langa's newsletter, the Langa List, on May 4, 2000 discusses "Censorship, Big Brother, AOL, and Site Ratings". In addition to keeping children away from porn web sites, Mr. Langa makes the case that AOL also uses their web filters to promote a political agenda. For example, children can visit the home page of the Republican National Committee, but not the Democratic National Committee. In general, AOL allows access to conservative web sites more often than to liberal web sites and readers of the newsletter have cited examples regarding gun control and abortion. Quoting Fred Langa:

AOL's "youth filters" protect kids from Democrats CNet covered this story on April 24, 2000. America Online provides "youth filters" that are supposed to keep kids out of dangerous Web sites--but they seem designed to eliminate creeping liberalism. 

AOL Restrictions Alleged October 10, 2000. The Washington Post. Page E01. By Alec Klein. America Online Inc. has imposed contractual conditions on Walt Disney Co. in recent years that aim to deter users from leaving AOL's network to reach competitors on the Web, according to sources who have reviewed the confidential documents.   

May 20, 2000. Neat Net Tricks Newsletter  issue 78. This is a direct quote from the newsletter: "And while on the subject of Spam and what's being done about it, a "thumbs-down" is in order to AOL for its latest seeming indifference to spam reports. They have apparently even a abolished their autoresponders and we can only assume that any complaints regarding the incessant spam over AOL lines are falling on deaf ears." There is no direct link to a web page that has the content of this newsletter. 

AOL, Love It or Log Off It  You've Got Junk E-Mail!
February 25, 2000. The Washington Post. One persons account of why they started using AOL and the spam flood that caused them to stop. The link has expired, to read this article you have to search for it on the web site of the newspaper which sells their old stories. 

Internet Is Losing Ground in Battle Against Spam The New York Times. Page 1. April 22, 2003. By Saul Hansell. The article says that the amount of spam aimed at AOL users has doubled between January 2003 and April 2003 and that spam now accounts for over 70 percent of the total email sent to AOL customers.  

AOL wary of Comcast, Road Runner mail CNET News.com April 1, 2003. In its latest attempt to crack down on spam, America Online has started blocking what it deems to be suspicious e-mail sent by customers of Comcast's High-Speed Internet and AOL Time Warner's Road Runner broadband services. Quoting: "...this antispam tactic can, in some cases, prevent legitimate mailers from contacting friends or colleagues with an AOL address."

AOL filters out some e-mail from ISPs CNET News.com June 11, 2003. America Online said a "technical change" in its spam filters blocked e-mails from an undisclosed list of Internet services. 

February 9, 2006. Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Walter Mossberg discussed moving email and your email address away from AOL. He suggested a service called TrueSwitch that costs $20, unless you're switching to MSN, AT&T or SBC/Yahoo, in which case it is free. TrueSwitch can copy saved emails, Web bookmarks and calendar entries. It is a Windows only product. 

May 18, 2005. From an Earthlink account, a message to an AOL customer was bounced back to me as undeliverable. This is why: "The IP address on your ISP's network has generated a high volume of mail to AOL and has exceeded our rate limit. Possible causes include a compromised or virus-infected personal computer or a non-disclosed server relaying mail within the ISP’s network."

See Can I read and send AOL e-mail using other e-mail applications? from AOL. November 2004. 

You've Got... Options By Walter Mossberg in the Wall Street Journal. June 2004. A review of four ways to get AOL email without using the AOL software. He has some criticisms of AOL email starting off with "... there are those among AOL's dwindling membership who use it for just one thing: e-mail. And most of these folks still fire up AOL's huge software program to manage it. The problem is, the program is clumsy, bombarding you with promotions for features you don't use. Even the e-mail module sticks you with an interface that, while recently improved, is still lacking." 

FYI: As of April 26, 2004 AOL supports access to their email from any email program that supports the IMAP protocol. Instructions for configuring email programs are at AOL keyword "open mail access." You can now use standard email programs like Outlook, Outlook Express, Eudora and even Mac OS X Mail. For more see members.aol.com/adamkb/aol/mailfaq/imap or in AOL use keyword "open mail access". Or go to help.channels.aol.com, choose "e-mail" under the "how to" menu and click on "open mail access". 

When ISPs Think They Know Best Is your Internet provider protecting you from spam--or censoring your inbox? by Anne Kandra in the July 2004 issue of PC World magazine May 26, 2004. About how AOL blocks email based on feedback from their customers. 

AOL Madness (Warn Your Friends) by Fred Langa in his newsletter the Langa List. April 19, 2004. This article discusses two reasons why AOL customers may not get email messages sent to them. First, if the message contains a link to a web site AOL does not like. See the top story in the topic of AOL and censorship for more on this. Second, if a handful of AOL customers are lazy and incorrectly report that an email newsletter is SPAM, then all AOL customers that subscribe to that newsletter no longer receive it. Why would an AOL customer lie about this? Because it's too much effort to unsubscribe to a newsletter. It's easier to report it as SPAM so it gets blocked. If this only effected the one lazy customer fine. It does not. It effects all AOL customers. Note that in both cases, this is a silent problem. The AOL customer has no idea that their email was thrown away. Mr. Langa reports that even if an AOL customer "white lists" the source of a newsletter, this is ignored, because the incorrectly targeted newsletter is thrown away by AOL before it gets to the inbox of their customers. 

Errant junk filters strike again by Brian Livingston. April 8, 2004. Brian's Buzz newsletter. Quoting: "AOL is constantly targeted by spammers and receives 1 to 2 billion spam messages per day. As a defensive measure, the ISP's bot filter simply deletes huge quantities of mail without ever delivering it, and errors are inevitable." This is a free, useful newsletter. It is not SPAM. AOL deleted the March 26, 2004 edition of the newsletter by mistake. So too did AOL subsidiaries, CompuServe and Netscape. 

The following points are from Upgraded AOL Still Needs Better Connections By Rob Pegoraro in the Washington Post August 10, 2003. 

• Email in AOL version 9 still evaporates out of your inbox after a week
• You can't sort mail saved on AOL into different folders
• You can't filter incoming e-mail by its sender
• The only screening option is the ability to block mail with designated words in the subject line -- a trick the spammers got wise to years ago.

FYI: for technical information about AOL email see postmaster.info.aol.com  

AOL 9.0: Improved, but still too pricey By Mike Langberg in the Mercury News August 14, 2003. Quoting: "AOL still resolutely refuses to give members true freedom of choice by supporting POP3 access to e-mail. POP3 is the technical standard that allows full-featured e-mail programs such as Microsoft's Outlook and Outlook Express and Qualcomm's Eudora to retrieve messages. By closing the door to POP3, AOL forces its members to use only e-mail software provided by the service itself -- a squeeze play that I find unacceptable."

Stephen H. Wildstrom writing in Business Week magazine (November 11, 2002) said: "I find AOL 8.0's e-mail all but unusable". Regarding the filtering of spam in AOL8 and MSN8 he said: "MSN also offers junk-mail control far more effective than AOL's. And unlike AOL, which simply discards mail it deems junk, MSN saves it for inspection in its own folder". Wow. AOL throws away email, it considers spam. What if its wrong? And it will be. All email filters make this mistake. 

Mike Langberg of the San Jose Mercury News says: "AOL 8 continues to deny subscribers the most basic tools for managing e-mail, such as creating custom folders to hold messages and ``rules'' or ``filters'' to sort incoming messages into those folders. Nor does AOL offer effective blocking for the oceans of spam that pollutes e-mail inboxes." Latest from AOL, MSN represent evolution of digital dinosaurs October 31, 2002. 

Walter Mossberg, writing in the Wall Street Journal on October 24, 2002 said the following about email in AOL v8: "AOL still has a crude, simplistic e-mail interface. You can't see any part of an e-mail until you open it, which is tedious with a lot of messages. You can't easily sort your e-mail into folders, or search your mailbox for specific senders or subjects or text, or do lots of other things that even the simplest, free e-mail programs allow."

Walter Mossberg. The Wall Street Journal. October 17, 2002. Mossberg's Mailbox. A reader asked about using Microsoft Outlook for AOL e-mail. Walter tested and vouched for eNetbot and aol2pop. Both should let you use any normal Internet email program such as Eudora, Thunderbird, Mozilla, Outlook Express, etc. 
Update: June 2004. eNetbot is $20 and he still recommends it. Aol2pop is now called email2pop and it is $26. Both offer free trials. See his more recent AOL email article above for two other ways to get AOL email. 

You've Got AOL? PC Magazine. May 7, 2002. About AOL email. Mostly gripes. This is part of an article about email programs. Quoting: "AOL has the least capable and least compatible e-mail of any client in this story."

Exporting the address book.  AOL does not provide a way to export your address book (email addresses) so that it can be imported into another address book. No doubt they do this to make it harder to switch away from AOL. I have found two articles that discuss ways around this:  

1. Walter Mossberg. The Wall Street Journal. July 11, 2002. Mossberg's Mailbox. A reader wants to quit AOL but has a large AOL address book and asked how to export the address book to Outlook Express. Mr. Mossberg suggested a program called Address Magic which costs $30. However it only works with the English language version of AOL 7. He also mentioned that Microsoft makes switching from AOL to MSN easy by providing software called TrueSwitch that transfers AOL address book entries to MSN's address book. 
      
2. AOL power tips: making an OK thing better. CNet. December 5, 2002. By Robert Luhn. The article explains how to use the AOL 7 and 8 feature that prints the address book to output it to a file. This involves creating a dummy printer in Windows. Its not a perfect solution as the file will need some reformatting before it can be imported somewhere else. The article also mentions free software due to be released in January 2003 that will do a better job of this. It has a slew of AOL gripes and then offers solutions for the assorted issues.  

I sent an AOL7 user an email message with a plain text (.TXT) file attached to it. AOL7 converted the attached file into part of the main body of the message. As a result, the recipient could not download the file, there was no attachment to download. The whole idea was for the recipient to download the file. To get around this, I sent the same file again, but this time the file name had no file type, that is, the name was a single string of characters with no dots/periods at all. Again, AOL converted the attached file to be part of the body of the message so the recipient again could not download the file. Then we tried to get the data onto the recipients computer by copying and pasting the data from the email message into Notepad. The did not work either because AOL7 looked into the attached file and displayed some HTML there as a web page rather than as plain text. This meant that HTML formatting, such as H2 tags were lost, they could not be copied and pasted. Eventually, I had to make a web page with a link to the plain text file and have the user download the file by right clicking on the web page link. The next day I tested this with an AOL6 user. The results were the same.  June 25, 2002 

When AOL and Time Warner merged, divisions of the old Time Warner were forced to adopt the AOL email system for internal use throughout the new company. Everyone hated the AOL email system and the policy has been changed. Among the attributes of AOL email that the article identified as making it unfit for serious business use were: the software crashed, messages can't handle large attachments, people were arbitrarily kicked offline, sometimes e-mails were lost and never found, and messages sent to large groups of people were mis-identified as spam and thrown away. 
Return to sender: AOL nixes e-mail rule CNET News.com by Jim Hu  March 22, 2002
AOL mail: OK for others, not itself By Matthew Rose and Martin Peers The Wall Street Journal. March 22, 2002. 

AOL blocked email messages from Harvard University informing students of their admission status. January 1, 2002. AOL thought they were junk mail (spam). Due to the anthrax spores Harvard used e-mail to inform 6,000 applicants of whether they had been rejected or accepted. For reasons that AOL could not explain, they blocked between 75 and 100 of the e-mails in December. Read about it at SiliconValley.com  

FYI (not a gripe): In the Wall Street Journal on May 25, 2000 and March 14, 2002 Walter Mossberg mentioned a $20 Windows program that lets AOL users get their AOL email using normal Internet email programs. The program is called eNetBot and it can be downloaded from www.enetbot.com. I have not used eNetBot. He specifically mentioned that it works with Outlook Express, Outlook and Eudora. He did not say whether it works with other email programs too. 

Fred Langa's newsletter, the Langa List discussed AOL email on October 12, 2000. The topic was how it does not support normal, standard hyperlinks. As a result, AOL customers have to copy/paste hyperlinks from an email message into their web browser. Many newsletters will supply hyperlinks both in standard format and in a special format just for AOL users. An AOL customer was told the reason for this is to avoid downloading viruses. This is not true. Quoting Mr. Langa: "There's absolutely no technical reason why AOL can't allow hyperlinks in external email--- or, for that matter, why they can't use the same public email standards almost *everyone else* uses. But instead, AOL has stuck with an ancient and proprietary email standard..."

Fred Langa's newsletter, the Langa List discussed on October 23, 2000 changes to AOL email in the upcoming version 6 of the AOL software. A reader said that the AOL address book will be moved from your computer to AOL's computers, the advantage being that no matter where you log on from, your address book will always be available. Also, the v6 address book will let you input phone numbers, real addresses, birthdays and more. In response, Mr. Langa said: 

AOL email is not standard Internet email and there are a number of repercussions to this (this is a bit dated) 

• AOL email is simplistic, it does not offer many features that standard Internet email programs do. Simple email is fine for beginners, but after a while you may outgrow its limitations.
• There are AOL email features that only work with other AOL customers (a page out of Microsoft's playbook) 
• You can not use a normal Internet email program (Netscape Messenger, Microsoft Outlook or Outlook Express, Eudora, Pegasus, etc) to send or receive AOL email 
• AOL email does not accept multiple attachments on an incoming message. It takes all the attachments and combines them into a single zip file which is confusing to people who don't know about zip files or who don't have an unzip program on their computer. 
• You can not export your email address book, which makes is harder to leave AOL. You can not print the address book, copy it to a file or even copy it into another application with normal Windows copy/paste functions. Note: In v6, you can finally print the address book. 
• It does not support vacation messages (also known as out-of-office messages, but no one in an office uses AOL) to Internet users. This is one of the features mentioned above that only works with other AOL users. 
• In the early days, you had to be at a computer with AOL software installed to send/receive your AOL email (now you can do it with a web browser). 
• Until version 6, it did not support normal HTML email. That is, if you use a standard Internet email program such as Netscape Messenger to send HTML based email, it will not be properly displayed by the AOL email program. 
• For the longest time, it did not support message filters, that is, you could not automatically file messages into folders based on rules (filters) that you define. Rules were introduced (I think in version 8) but they were spam related. I don't know if the current AOL software has rules that auto-file messages into folders. 
• Until version 6, it did not allow you to sort your email messages by sender or date or subject.
• AOL version 5 email did not accept an attached web page. (Not tried with version 6 or later). 

September 25, 2004. Steve Bass tried to find a way to export an address book in version 9 and failed. All he could find were utilities for version 8. To export AOL Favorites in version 9, Steve Bass turned up linkaGoGo 

Upgraded AOL Still Needs Better Connections  By Rob Pegoraro in the Washington Post August 10, 2003. Gripes with v9 email in this article are in the email section of this web page. This fair article includes quite a few gripes about AOL version 9 software. 

AOL 9.0: Improved, but still too pricey By Mike Langberg in the Mercury News August 14, 2003. Quoting: "AOL became the nation's biggest provider of online service by stressing simplicity and friendliness. Yet the training wheels seem permanently welded onto AOL's frame; the service hasn't kept pace with the growing sophistication of users and -- in a perhaps fatal mistake -- continues to overestimate its value by clinging to excessive monthly rates."

Walter Mossberg, writing in the Wall Street Journal on October 24, 2002, preferred MSN version 8 to AOL version 8. Quoting:  "MSN has now surpassed AOL. MSN 8 offers a better online experience than AOL 8.0, in my view, even for the average, mainstream users to whom AOL has always catered. The new MSN gives its members much more personalization, much better e-mail tools, better spam-fighting weapons, better parental controls, better personal-finance tools, and an overall cleaner, fresher look and feel. And it does all this without adding complexity or being hard to use." In addition he points out that MSN is $2 a month cheaper than AOL.

Latest from AOL, MSN represent evolution of digital dinosaurs. By Mike Langberg San Jose Mercury News. October 31, 2002. The author says AOL deserves disdain for "liberally sprinkling advertising banners and buttons throughout their many screens."  He thinks there are too many choices on the main screen and says AOL bends their editorial judgment to push products from Time Warner, especially regarding movies and music. They also tout "exclusive content" about which he says "Don't be fooled" noting that there is too much money to be made from consumers who don't use AOL for them to confine anything truly valuable within AOL.   

Note: see the Email topic for gripes on AOL 8 email. 

FYI: AOL version 8 requires 64 meg of memory.     

May 22, 2001. Dear AOL users: Toss the training wheels and save money! David Coursey, ZDnet AnchorDesk. AOL is about to increase the monthly cost to $23.90 making them the most expensive of the big consumer ISPs. Now that competition has dwindled, AOL can safely increase rates without too much fear of customer defection. If I had just a single Internet connection, it would not be AOL.

January 2, 2002. Higher access fee hits some AOL users. CNET News.com. By Jim Hu. America Online has quietly raised the price for people wishing to access AOL through their own Internet service (BYOA) from $10 to $15. The company did not promote the changes to the general public. The price increase affects new subscribers to BYOA since October 2001. Customers currently paying the lower rate will continue to do so. Currently about 1 million people subscribe to the BYOA plan.  

January 3, 2002. A security bug in AOL Instant Messenger can allow someone on the Internet to delete your files or gain control of your computer. The bug affects Windows users of the free AIM software available for download on the Web, not users of the instant-messaging function built into AOL's paid online service. Specifically, it affects AIM version 4.3 and later.  Perhaps the most interesting part of this story is how AOL handled it.  Matt Conover, a student at Utah State University who discovered the bug, reported it to AOL about a week ago by sending an e-mail to an address on AOL's Web site. When the company failed to respond, he went public about the problem. Very soon after the bad publicity started, the bug was fixed by AOL. Mr. Conover said: "The developers of a product with so many users should be much more cautious and avoid overbloating with a multitude of features they didn't have time to properly test in the first place."  There are an estimated 30 million AIM users. The fix does not require AIM users to download new software. AOL never mentioned the problem to it's customers. This story was covered in SiliconValley.com  ZDNet  and CNet's news.com. You can also read what Matt Conover had to say.   

AOL Instant Messenger is hacked. Salon Magazine. April 27, 2002. By David Cassel. At the same time as the AIM home page was boasting that a "Potential AIM Security Issue Resolved," three 17-year-olds were inserting pornographic images into America Online's widely used chat service. Crackers inserted pornographic images into "AIM Today" and vandalized content on at least four screens of the chat software. The "AIM Today" window was added in August 2001 to the latest versions of the AIM software. Anyone who clicked on the "entertainment" link on AIM Today, followed by a click on any of the following three links advertising the chance to "Meet New People" who wanted to discuss the categories of "Celebrities," "Soap Operas" or "Comedy," would pull up pages displaying pornography. 

AIM security hole still threatens users. ZDNet. May 6, 2002. AOL failed to properly fix a security hole in its AOL Instant Messenger application, leaving users vulnerable to a new way to exploit the same flaw. The bug allows malicious AIM users to execute any program on a vulnerable user's computer. 

AOL's Instant-Messaging Games Continue July 23, 2002. Dan Gillmor. AOL pretended for a long time to be in favor of letting their AIM service interact with competing instant messaging services. They finally came clean and said they do not want to interoperate.

AIM Misfires. November 22, 2002. PC Magazine. An adult employee of PC Magazine had his AIM account suspended. To re-activate it he had to provide his credit card to AOL to verify that he is over age 13. 

If you hold onto an AOL account just for your email address, consider using their "light use" plan, which is $5 a month for three hours of access. That is more than enough time just to download email. You will not need AOL to send email. 

A recorded phone call of a customer (Vincent Ferrari) trying to cancel their AOL service and the hard sell from AOL to prevent it was big news in June 2006:

• MP3_Recording:_Trying_to_cancel_AOL  June 13, 2006  Alternate Link
• At digg.com this generated 504 comments in about a week.
• AOL Said, 'If You Leave Me I'll Do Something Crazy' by Randall Stross in the New York Times July 2, 2006. Quoting: "The employees who handle cancellation requests belong not to a Cancellations Processing Department but rather to AOL's "Retention Queue." They are referred to as "retention consultants" and "save employees," and their bonuses depend upon the number of members who are induced to stay with offers of new enticements and deals, not on the speed with which they help members leave."
• The story was on the "Today" show too. Video at YouTube.com 

December 17, 2005. The following are anonymous quotes are from a newsletter by Steve Bass of PC World magazine, so take them with a grain of salt: 

• Call AOL and explain that you are leaving because PeoplePC or is so much cheaper and, viola, there is a new "discount price" available. Of course you can also call and complain about the terrible service (and with AOL you really do not have to fib!) and you will be given a month for free. I know people who have not paid a cent for the last year and a half!
   
• I use their AOL for Broadband service and was paying $14.99 for unlimited broadband and 10 hours dial-up access. I called them and told them I wanted to cancel since most of what I want is available at aol.com and I'm now paying $7.99 for the same service. 

Canceling AOL? Just Offer Your Firstborn by Tom Zeller in the New York Times. August 29, 2005. 

Fifty Ways to Leave AOL By Ed Foster August 26th, 2005. Quoting: "It certainly makes you wonder just how bad AOL's business really is when they have to resort to such tactics just to keep up the appearance of retaining customers."

AOL Settles Case Accusing It of Thwarting Cancellations by Jennifer Bayot in The New York Times August 25, 2005. AOL was sued by Eliot Spitzer, the New York State attorney general for "making it unduly difficult for customers to drop the service."  Mr. Spitzer claimed that employees could earn a bonus up to $3,115 a month by recording 975 "saves." AOL agreed to pay a fine of $1.25 million and said it would no longer award bonuses to employees that talked customers out of quitting. The article points out that AOL is constantly losing customers to other Internet Service Providers that offer faster connection speeds for less money. If you tried to cancel your AOL service but couldn't, you can file a claim for up to four months of charges at www.oag.state.ny.us/internet/internet.html

•  AOL TO REFORM CUSTOMER SERVICE PROCEDURES. Press release from the New York State AG. Settlement Requires Company to Remove Obstacles Consumers Face When Seeking to Switch or Cancel Service. August 24, 2005. Quoting: "In response to approximately 300 consumer complaints, Spitzer’s office began an inquiry of AOL’s customer service policies. The investigation revealed that the company had an elaborate system for rewarding employees who purported to retain or "save" subscribers who had called to cancel their internet service. In many instances, such retention was done against subscribers’ wishes, or without their consent."

Reader Voices: AOL Cancellations by Ed Foster August 18th, 2005. Quoting: "Readers agreed that it's always been hard to cancel an AOL account, but some of those responding to my recent story had some good advice for how to go about making sure your cancellation sticks."

It's Hard to Say Goodbye to AOL By Ed Foster May 13th, 2005

AOL to Settle Case Brought by FTC Firm Accused of Mistreating Subscribers Washington Post September 24, 2003. Quoting: "America Online yesterday agreed to settle Federal Trade Commission charges that it treated subscribers unfairly by failing to live up to the terms of some rebate offers and by making it too difficult to cancel monthly subscriptions to the Internet service." They agreed to do better.

AOL and Compuserve Settle FTC Charges of Unfair Practices  A press release from the FTC. FTC Alleges That Charges Continued for Subscribers Who Asked to Cancel; $400 Rebates Were Not Delivered as Promised September 23, 2003. 

A relative of mine is an AOL customer. She signed up for a free trial of a new feature that reads you your e-mail over the telephone. When the free trial was over, she called AOL on the phone to discontinue this feature (I think it was an extra $5 a month). There was confusion as to what was being cancelled. The AOL person on the phone did not just cancel the e-mail over the telephone feature, but instead cancelled the AOL service completely. Anyone can make a mistake, but.... The same person who cancelled the AOL service could not re-instate it. In fact no one at AOL could or would re-instate it. As my relative uses their AOL e-mail address for business, she was quite upset. Why would AOL not restore the account over the phone? Why would they turn away a customer? The main account was in her husbands name. A spouse can cancel an account but not re-instate it. I wonder if children can also cancel accounts? Eventually it got resolved, but it was a major pain in the neck that consumed a lot of time and many phone calls. February 2001. 

FYI: Microsoft has a new account-migration service that makes it easier for people to switch from America Online to its MSN Internet access service. Called TrueSwitch, it helps AOL users migrate their address books, calendars and archived e-mail to MSN. It can also cancel a user's AOL account and forward email sent to the old AOL account to the new MSN address for 30 days. To notify everyone of your new email address, it sends a message to everyone in your address-book. Stay with Microsoft for 3 months and get a $50 rebate. May 20, 2002.

AOL lost over a million customers since late last year. This "dramatic decline" in subscribers is far worse than AOL had projected. The article says they are losing out on the low end to NetZero, Juno and other cheap Internet Service Providers (about $10 a month), and on the high end to more expensive high-speed cable and DSL broadband access. Verizon is mentioned as providing DSL service for only $35 a month. Washington Post. June 4, 2003

Quoting: "America Online's subscriber base plunged by 846,000 over the past three months, as hundreds of thousands left for cheaper or faster Internet connections...In addition, new disclosures about a massive federal probe into improper accounting at Northern Virginia-based America Online showed that the division's legal problems are hurting other parts of the AOL Time Warner media empire". AOL Subscribers Down by 846,000. The Washington Post. July 23, 2003. 

Breaking up is hard to do, especially with AOL By Mike Cassidy in the Mercury News December 2, 2003. The author, a Mercury News columnist, tries to cancel his AOL account. The article says that during 2003, AOL lost 2 million customers. At first, he was offered two months free to not cancel his account. Then he was offered a cheaper AOL service intended for email only. When he told AOL he was getting rid of his computer, they suggested keeping the account and using it at the library or at his office. 
Update: This article is no longer on siliconvalley.com but can be found in the Google cache. August 28, 2005. 

A reader claiming to be a former AOL employee (I can't verify this) warned that sometimes when customers requested the cancellation of their accounts, AOL employees would instead forgive the monthly charges for a few months after which the customer starts getting billed all over again. This ruse lets the company inflate their membership numbers. Again, there is no way I can confirm this. February 20, 2004. 

 

Assorted Gripes

The AOL software is archaic when it comes to dealing with modems. I added a new modem to a Windows 98 computer and told Windows 98 about the modem (installed the driver). I used the modem to dial a normal ISP with Dialup Networking. Then I ran the AOL version 4 software and tried to tell it about the new modem. It should ask Windows 98 for modem definitions. It does not. Instead it maintains its own modem definitions completely separate and independent of the modems Windows 98 knows about. It tries to auto-detect the new modem or lets you manually chose a modem from a long list. This is just asking for problems. Considering how long Windows has been keeping track of modems and how long AOL has had their software, it is disgraceful that it does not use the modem definitions from the operating system. 

Its hard, if not impossible, to get your desired userid (they call them screen names). The New York Times wrote (September 7, 2000) that AOL has 23 million members. Each member could theoretically use 7 different screen names for a total of 161 million. Add to that, the screen names of dear departed AOL customers (they call them members) and the likelihood of getting your desired userid is pretty small. When people quit AOL their screen names are still reserved for a minimum of 6 months, but most likely for longer. 

AOL software (up to and including version 7) only tells you the connection speed of your dial-up modem connection for a couple seconds. If you blink, you miss it. All versions of the Windows dialer show you the connection speed both when it first connects to the Internet and also any time later that you care to look. 

As far as I know, there is no way to move your AOL favorite places from one computer with AOL software to another computer with AOL software. I have read, however, that you can export your AOL favorite places with bookmarksync (I have not tried this) which should let you import them into a normal web browser. There is also no way to sort your favorite places (up to and including v5, I have not checked this out on v6).  December 2000.      

You can't print your Favorite Places. from within AOL. John Gilroy has a solution. (added October 31, 2002)

As everyone knows, when you double click on a file in Windows Explorer, the operating system starts the correct program to deal with the file. For example, files ending in "doc" cause Word to run and files ending in "txt" cause notepad to run. Files ending in "htm" or "html" cause a web browser to run (whichever is your default browser). On a computer with either AOL5 or AOL6 (and possible earlier versions too I don't know) double clicking on html files causes AOL to run. 

AOL Anti - Spam Effort Loses E - mail  March 19, 2001. The Associated Press. Reported by CNet, the New York Times and SilliconValley.com. Hundreds of thousands of e-mails sent by EarthLink Inc. customers to America Online accounts were rejected and lost over a period spanning at least 10 days. No error indication was returned to the sender of the email messages. EarthLink complained that AOL had not assigned executives at a level high enough to resolve the trouble more quickly. The email is lost forever, AOL can not recover it. EarthLink estimates the number of messages as "in the hundreds of thousands." AOL said their systems worked correctly and declined to detail how many e-mails it blocked. 

Sweaty Scenes from the life of an AOL censor. March 21, 2001. This is an interesting FYI story, not a gripe. It is from the Village Voice, a newspaper in New York City. Quoting from the beginning of the article "We were supposed to monitor screen names and profiles for vulgar content at America Online. Four of us shared this position, warning members and even canceling their accounts for violating the company's Terms of Service (TOS). In AOL's campaign to keep the Web safe for suburbia, we stood as the first line of defense." It's an interesting article that ends with a difficult question. The author gets a phone call from a woman who "frantically" explains that "Her young son had been chatting online, and when she went to get him for dinner, she found his room empty. A last instant message was posted on the screen: "See you soon, can't wait." She begged me for the name and address of the person behind the dangling screen name." AOL rules did not allow giving out the real name and address of the person chatting with the child. They did not call the Police in the area where this person lived. This drove the author to quit.

AOL Time Warner refuses to run TV ads from Internet rivals.  June 13, 2001. Conditions for approval of the merger between America Online and Time Warner required that the companies not discriminate against their rivals.

Is There Life After AOL?  June 21, 2001. Not a gripe article, just a discussion of AOL in the New York Times. However, it includes this quote "What surprises me is that so many people use AOL but no one seems to like it..." and mentions "problems that have dogged AOL for years, like spotty access and the pop-up advertising and junk e-mail that so many customers find annoying."

Poll exposes cracks in AOL's armor. Reuters. About 40 percent of AOL customers said they were "clearly dissatisfied with the brand, service and customer support". May 21, 2002.

FYI:  More of Bass's Top Tips for Better Computing by Steve Bass of PC World Magazine. Read about an easy, free way to speed up AOL.  AOL Speed is a small program that patches AOL and lets it make better use of its own cache. It supports AOL 4, 5, 6 and 7. June 28, 2002. 

AOL "cooked books" as dot.com bubble burst. By Andrew Orlowski July 18, 2002. The Register. AOL misrepresented its accounts in three quarterly periods as the 'New Economy' bubble was bursting, according to an investigation by the Washington Post. In October 2000, AOL's then President Bob Pittman deceived financial analysts and investors by saying he "didn't see" any drop-off in advertising revenue, although two weeks earlier he had been briefed about the fall, and its consequences for the business. 
Unconventional Transactions Boosted Sales. The Washington Post. By Alec Klein. July 18, 2002. The Washington Post reviewed hundreds of pages of confidential AOL documents and interviewed current and former company officials and their business partners.

FYI: Yahoo News Full Coverage has a section devoted to AOL.

Font Sizes:  I installed AOL v7 on an ultra-light laptop that crams 1024x768 pixels in a 12 inch screen. To make reading web pages easier on the eyes, I told IE5 to ignore the font size specified on web pages (Tools -> Internet Options -> Accessibility) . This affords me total control over the font sizes on all web pages via the Size button (or View -> Text Size). When IE is invoked directly it works fine. However, when web pages are viewed from within the AOL software, there is no text size option. October 19, 2002.

AOL users of the JCPenney Portraits web site, SmilesByWire, will have problems seeing the online pictures clearly. The web site has an explanation of the problem, a fix and a link to relevant documentation from AOL. November 12, 2002.  

An article in the New York Times (New Strategy From AOL Leaves Many Unconvinced, December 5, 2002) quotes an analyst as saying: "AOL pretty much owns the mass consumer who doesn't like change, and is too dumb and lazy to change his e-mail address". The article characterized AOL's decision to emphasize the $15 bring-your-own-access plan as "an admission of defeat". AOL dial-up customers that upgrade to broadband can pay $15 a month on top of the cost of their broadband access to maintain their AOL email address. However, this no longer lets them dial into AOL when traveling. Finally, the article mentioned that in the third quarter of 2002, AOL added fewer new customers than MSN or United Online, which operates Juno. 

AOL: Anatomy of a Long Shot Business Week magazine. December 16, 2002. An inside look at how it developed a make-or-break broadband plan. This article is not focused on gripes. It describes their new strategy, which they need because they are losing 200,000 subscribers per month to broadband providers. They are hoping that you will pay extra ($3 to $18) for some of AOL's features after you switch to getting your Internet access via DSL or Cable. What features? One of the must-haves is a phone service to read your email to you (see the next item for more on this). For years AOL has offered a bring-our-own access service for people who use another ISP. They didn't however, advertise it or promote it much because they were afraid of cannibalizing their more profitable dial-up business. 

In the November 30, 2002 issue of his newsletter, Dave Burstein of DSL Prime, said the following about AOL's new strategy:

AOL's analyst meeting today will introduce the unlikely strategy of making money on broadband by getting people to pay $15/month for infomercials and limited exclusive content. David Kirkpatrick in the Times ...  projects their budget for this content is perhaps $1/subscriber, meaning most of it will be movie trailers, magazine reprints, and sales promotions - infomercials. ... Several million people pay AOL to keep their email address and buddy list active, but those customers will drift away over time. No carrier in the world has persuaded large numbers to sign up because of their "exclusive" content. No matter whether you're Yahoo, MSN, AOL, BT OpenWorld, Telfonica/Lycos or make dozens of content deals, 90% of what a user wants from the net will come from somewhere else.

How Sharp Is AOL's New Vision? FORTUNE magazine. December 18, 2002. Quoting: "AOL's second problem is less immediate but more far-reaching: The company is spending virtually nothing on R&D, especially in software ... AOL's competitive advantages over rivals are extremely low tech: e-mail addresses people don't want to alter and online socializing that has remained essentially unchanged for years. Eventually, though, consumers will gravitate to online services that give them superior ways of working, socializing, manipulating media, and organizing their lives online--those are all software challenges."

Making an OK thing better, part II. CNet. December 19, 2002. By Robert Luhn. Quoting: "But AOL has since fallen prey to the lowest-common-denominator syndrome ... Instead of closely examining Microsoft Outlook, Qualcomm Eudora, Lotus Notes, and other leading e-mail programs, then adding just the right features with that special simplified twist that AOL does so well, AOL floundered. Instead of creating a more dynamic, automated, and flexible application, it did practically nothing, sticking users with a dated e-mailer." Rather than just gripe, this article reviews add-on software to to bring AOL "into the 21st century".

In the last three months of 2002 the number of AOL subscribers dropped by 170,000, the first time the number of customers has ever decreased. This, despite a recent $1 billion advertising and promotion campaign. Combined with the decrease in advertising revenue and the largest corporate loss ever, CNBC refers to the situation as AO-Hell. Washington Post. January 31, 2003

File Cabinet Problem: February 25, 2003. Someone I know uses AOL 6 under Windows 98. While re-sorting the File Cabinet, AOL seemed to hang. Windows was rebooted and now AOL 6 does not start. Forget logging on, it never even gets to the logon window. The AOL software appears to hang when started, and eventually Windows complains about not having any more memory. Apparently the AOL software is trying to process the File Cabinet during the startup and the File Cabinet is broken. 

To verify that the problem is a corrupted File Cabinet, we moved the File Cabinet to a Windows 95 computer also running AOL 6. The files that make up the File Cabinet are in the AOL 6.0 directory in a sub-directory called "organize". I figured this out on my own. AOL6 on the Windows 95 machine was fine. After moving the suspect file cabinet files however, this copy of AOL 6 also hung during startup. Rebooting Windows 95 and restoring the original File Cabinet files restored AOL6 to normal. 

No doubt about it, the File Cabinet from AOL6 on the original Windows 98 machine is corrupted in such a way that it prevents the AOL software from starting up. At this point, AOL tech support was contacted. Their solution was to re-install the AOL 6 software. As dumb a solution as possible. This is what tech support people say when they want to get rid of you. From the symptoms, it was obvious the problem was not with the AOL software but with the File Cabinet. 

I advised the AOL customer not to bother re-installing the AOL software, but to try calling AOL tech support again. This time, tech support made the problem worse. Over the phone they did something that wiped out some AOL cache files. This did not fix the problem, the AOL software still did not start up. 

To at least be able to use AOL, I helped the customer copy the File Cabinet files from the Windows 95 computer to the Windows 98 computer. With a good set of File Cabinet files, AOL6 on Windows 98 worked fine. However, thanks to AOL tech support wiping out files, there is no longer an email address book. In fact, all three AOL screen names lost their address books. What started as a File Cabinet problem is now also a lost address book problem. Also lost, were the stored passwords and favorites. 

The AOL web site however still had the address books. I suspect that every now and then the AOL software synchs the address book between your computer and theirs. As such, it was only a matter of time before the address book on www.aol.com was also wiped out. Needless to say, you can not save or export the address book from the AOL web site. They don't want you to do this because it would make it easier to quit AOL. 

Now we have to contact AOL again to see if the address books can be re-built on the Windows 98 machine. . . 

Remove AOL Intrusions  PC World Magazine. February 2003 issue.  When AOL Instant Messenger was installed it added an AOL Web site to Internet Explorer's trusted list. Quoting the article: "This is like a parking attendant who makes copies of your keys while you dine." The article says that AOL is granting itself remote access to your computer and includes instructions for removing it. 

Can AOL Survive? By John C. Dvorak in PC Magazine. March 17, 2003. This is not a gripe article, but is quite interesting. In a word, the author says no. Quoting: "... the company lost nearly $3,800 per subscriber in 2002 ... All that keeps AOL afloat is a lot of smart people who manage to keep a lot of plates spinning in what now appears to be a circus act at Ringling Brothers. Now the books are being examined. It's amazing what creative accounting can do."

AOL's Wobbly World Wide Wow David Simons, Forbes Magazine. April 17, 2003. It's a mistake to offer high-priced premium services on top of high-priced basic services. Quoting: "Broadband with AOL costs at least 20% more than buying broadband access alone... the modest hodgepodge of streaming news, music radio and sports that AOL offers for $14.95 per month is strikingly similar to what Yahoo! and RealNetworks sell for $9.95 ... Many AOL subscribers, now more adventurous about going beyond AOL's walled garden, may say 'Wow!' - but not in the sense AOL expects." 

Windows XP Problems 
Windows update may not work under Windows XP if run from the web browser inside the AOL software. Microsoft says "The AOL Web browser does not communicate properly with the Windows Installer software, and this may cause Windows Installer to stop responding." 

FYI: Troubleshooting America Online in Windows XP from Microsoft.  

AOL called my house today and yesterday. Telephone spam. They must really be hurting. May 15, 2003.

AOL closes a Windows service October 24, 2003 CNET News.com. AOL shuts down Windows Messenger. Most people feel this a good thing, that Messenger is used by spammers and hardly anyone needs it any more. The gripe is that the AOL software modifies your computer and they don't tell you they are doing so. If this is the corporate mindset, what next?  

AOL takes passage to India December 22, 2003 from CNET News.com. America Online is quietly laying the groundwork to hire software engineers in Bangalore, India--a decision that is sparking some pointed criticism. AOL already has a call center in India

March 4, 2004. A question to Walter Mossberg in the Wall Street Journal: "Please tell me how I can replace the AOL Welcome Screen with the My AOL page. I called AOL twice, and they don't have a clue as to how to do it". He answered the question, but AOL should have been able to also. 

April 25, 2004. Large Fonts do not display correctly: AOL Version 9.0, downloaded and installed today. Windows 2000 SP4. AOL does not correctly handle large system fonts. In Windows 2000 you can tell Windows to use larger fonts than it normally would via: Display Properties -> Settings tab -> Advanced Button -> General tab -> Font size. Other flavors of Windows also allow for increasing the size of the default fonts. The AOL software does not correctly deal with this, as a result things get chopped off. In the example shown here, on the left hand side you see the second line being chopped off. On the right hand side the name of the two Spyware removal utilities does not display. This AOL window was not scrollable, there was no way to see the name of the utilities.

April 25, 2004. Problem installing version 9.0. Windows 2000 SP4. On a computer that had AOL version 7 already installed, I logged on to AOL, went to keyword UPDATE and downloaded the AOL v9.0 software. When the installation of version 9 started, it failed with the error "Could not initialize installation. (CRC) Cannot create a file when that file already exits". I tried this a few times, varying the answers to the initial questions asked by the the upgrade program, but could not get rid of this error. I tried installing v9.0 into a different directory to no avail. To get around this, I un-installed AOL version 7, rebooted, went to www.aol.com and downloaded the version 9.0 software a second time. Then it worked.

"I'd switch to tin cans and string before I allowed AOL on any computer in my home or office." by Ed Bott on his blog. April 19, 2004. 

An AOL dialup user kept getting kicked offline so he ran AOL's AutoFix program, which fixed the problem. He claims however that the AutoFix program changed the phone number he dials to a long distance toll number without his realizing it. This results in a $3,400 phone bill. AOL claims that it's not their problem. N.H. Official Seeks to Help With Bill Associated Press April 19, 2004

The No-Hassle Guide to Taming America Online by Scott Spanbauer From the June 2004 issue of PC World magazine April 28, 2004 Choose, install, and customize the version of AOL that best suits your style.

The AOL Stupidhighway by Matt Hartley in Lockergnome. July 9, 2004. Why AOL is an inferior product. 

Possible security breach seen at AOL  ComputerWorld August 20, 2004. America Online is acknowledging an "issue" that allowed some of its members to gain access to online financial portfolios of other members. 

AOL, and Irresponsible Tech by a reader of the Langa List newsletter. August 25, 2004. About AOL sending text messages to a cellphone and not being able to turn it off.

Even ads for AOL get griped about. You've Got Commercials! Bad ones. AOL's new campaign fails in every way. by Seth Stevenson in Slate. November 8, 2004. 

The price of AOL dial-up is going up from $24 to $26 (in round numbers). This article, from the Associated Press mentions that if you know to ask for it, they have a non-publicized price of only $18 a month with a one year commitment. There is also a $15/month plan with 10 hours of dial-up access. 
AOL to Charge Same for Dial-Up, Broadband February 21, 2006. 

AOL Search Data Reportedly Released by Jeremy Kirk, IDG News Service August 7, 2006. The apparent release of searches made by hundreds of thousands of users is raising privacy concerns.

AOL Security Tools Raise Adware Questions by Robert McMillan, IDG News Service August 17, 2006. Consumer advocates criticize AOL's free Active Virus Shield antivirus software licensing agreement.

AOL 9.0 Accused of Behaving Like Badware by Robert McMillan, IDG News Service August 28, 2006. Anti-malware group says the software deceives users and interferes with computer use. 

The actual report from Stopbadware.org on exactly why they rated AOL v9 software as "badware". August 28, 2006. 

Page created: January 2000

Last updated: August 30, 2006