AOL Opens IMAP Mail Access Today

Posted on April 5, 2004

Today’s a big day over at AOL — they’ve finally seen the light and, as of today, they are allowing users full access to their AOL mail via IMAP. That’s right, no more requiring the AOL client to get your mail — you can pull it down into any IMAP client you like, over any ISP. (They’re not trumpeting this very loudly, but people on AOL’s beta-testers list like me got an e-mail about this late last week.) I’m reading my AOL mail in Mozilla Thunderbird right now.

Nice! And about time. Providing full IMAP support is pretty forward-looking when you consider that competitors like Earthlink are still stuck on POP3.

For the record, if you’re one of the people who can make use of this, the servers to point to are imap.aol.com and smtp.aol.com.