AOL's free AIM.COM email is surprisingly good

AOL SHOCKED me with its new AIM free email offering. Launched two weeks ago, the interface is clean and the account can be accessed using standard IMAP protocol, a clear advantage over GMail's pop3 access. It's thus possible to configure AIM.com free accounts on popular e-mail clients like Mozilla's Thunderbird, Eudora, all versions of Netscape with an e-mail client, and, well, also the ubiquitous Microsoft Lookout! ^B^B^B^B^B Outlook Express, all of which support IMAP accounts so you can roam seamlessly between different PCs.

AIM.com's inbox view when logged in with a web browser (webmail interface)

Regular readers know that online giant AOL is one of my pet peeves, specially after the departure of Steve Case and the following shutdown of their browser division, which cut the company's formal involvement in the Mozilla project and terminated the company's involvement with anything-Linux.

However, I like giving credit when credit is due. I was highly sceptical of AOL's latest entry into the "free email" marketplace, dubbed "AIM Mail". The company's promise is simple: if you ever used AIM you already had a free "aim screen name", so AOL decided now to give everyone a free email account that goes along with every free AIM user name ("screen name" in AOLSpeak). Thus, johndoe24 on aim automagically gets "johndoe24@aim.com" as an associated email address. Users of the free 250MB Netscape.net webmail can also use their existing user name and password to get an extra 2GB account on AIM.com.

Reading a message through a web browser

I originally thought "sheesh, who needs yet another free email service?". Well, it turns out that the free AIM.com accounts have some real advantages:

• Two gigabytes free matches Google's GMail, compared to 1GB free by Yahoo.com
• Can be accessed using the IMAP4 protocol and any modern e-mail program (GMail only offers pop3 so far).
• Cheaper than Yahoo: you get 2GB free with IMAP access. Yahoo charges $20 a year for 2GB, and only offers POP3 access, not IMAP.
• Clean, DHTML and flash-free web interface.
• There's only a single ad banner shown, which doesn't get in the way.
• IMAP4 access leaves all e-mail on the server, allowing easy roaming between different systems.
• Inbound mail is scanned for viruses, free. (an infected email containing a zipped .class java exploit was bounced at the SMTP server, never even reaching the inbox).
• You can create new message folders - which can contain sub folders - over IMAP
• Customizable "away" message (auto responder)
• Three pre-set levels of anti-spam filter sensitivity.
• Spellchecker on the web interface
• Works ok on Mozilla, Firefox browsers (a new AOL indeed!), and any IMAP4 e-mail client

Javascript based spellchecker for the web interface (apparently US-English only)

Now the bad: the search feature is nowhere as powerful as GMail's. The web based "search" function apparently works merely on the sender or subject lines, and when you attempt to use the search function of your email client over IMAP and select the search to include the message bodies as well -which is a cpu-intensive operation on the imap4 server, if implemented- you get the message "Command 'SEARCH' not supported", which clearly shows that AOL has decided not to enable it, or doesn't have it implemented on their servers.

Best Feature: standard IMAP4 access from any e-mail program that supports the standard IMAP protocol

If you don't mind lacking the powerful GMail search but do want a large free account with IMAP4 access, AIM.com is a pretty good deal. Now here's an idea for AOL: enable IMAP4 search for those who want it, for a small yearly fee. So "paying customers" would get full imap4 search and a couple extra GB of storage. Is this enough to make AIM.com my primary email address? Not yet, but I'll use my new @aim.com email address for mailing lists.

The new Netscape Webmail seems to use the same web back-end, so why not increase the storage space and offer IMAP as well?

I'm left wondering: AOL has done a good job and retrofitted this new AIM.com mail back end to also serve the @netscape.net free webmail accounts, giving a choice of using the old html interface or the new AIM.com DHTML one, so why keep the 250MB limit in place for Netscape.net accounts, and why not enabling true imap access for those as well?. INQuiring minds want to know. µ