AOL email account blocked.

System

Well why should we pay for email accounts when we can have several G Mail accounts for free? One of the reasons I left AOL Mail was because I was not getting my emails. Which is no good because for example. Say you sign up on a forum including this one.You must activate your account with your email address. And how can you do that if the email never got sent to you?

But when you use G Mail all of your emails get sent to you. I say G Mail is the best service but AOL is not. Another service to avoid is Hotmail which is also bad. Not as bad as AOL but quite bad.

But I am not the first person who complains about AOL Mail. Other people don't like it either. I say G Mail is the best free email service. And they don't deactivate your account unless you have not logged in for a year I think it is. Yahoo is second best, but the problem with them is that if you don't log into your account for 3 months they deactivate it.

Andrew_Cottrell

annbarbs wrote: »

Well why should we pay for email accounts when we can have several G Mail accounts for free?

I'm not saying you should pay. I'm merely suggesting that a free email account may not be suitable for business accounts.

System

Well maybe you should try G Mail it's free but better than most other email accounts.

[Deleted User]

annbarbs wrote: »

What pay for an email account? Give over. I use both G Mail and Yahoo Mail which are free accounts and they are much better than AOL. But everybody says the same thing about AOL it's rubbish.

i`ve had an aol email account for 12 years and not a single problem with it,even though aol is no longer my isp i still use the email

Kite2010

AOL are one of the better ISP email providers in still giving access once your no longer paying into their pot.

Johnmcl7

annbarbs wrote: »

Well maybe you should try G Mail it's free but better than most other email accounts.

Andrew's point is correct - you should not use free accounts like Gmail for business accounts, I have used Gmail for personal accounts pretty much since it started but still wouldn't recommend it for business use for the reasons Andrew has mentioned, I accept that if things go wrong with my mailbox that there are no guarantees on when or if the issues may be resolved. For business use that isn't acceptable particularly in the event the data is lost which again there is no guarantee it will be retrieved. Unsurprisingly the support you get when there are issues with the account don't tend to be prompt and why should they on a free service, there's been a couple of times where access has been down to my mailbox for over a day and nothing at all from Google.

There's also the issue of the mails being scanned for contextual ads which depending on the policy of who you're communicating with may not be suitable either.

John

System

Kite2010 wrote: »

AOL are one of the better ISP email providers in still giving access once your no longer paying into their pot.

Yes AOL is also an Internet service Provider. By the way AOL is short for America Online,so AOL is an American company. Although they have branches in England as well as in America.

But you don't have to be with AOL as your ISP to use their free email services. AOL is like Google and MSN. they provide some free web service like Flicker, Bebo I think and also AOL email.

If you are inactive for a certain time,that is if you have not logged into AOL for a few weeks. When you do log in you get a message saying your account has been blocked due to unusual activity,please change your password. Which is what happened to me.

So I had to jump through hops to get my account back,I had to fill in some difficult to read captcha but that was not the end of it.

I had to answer the security question I created when I opened my email account. Then they asked for my postcode. And most people like me give a false name and postcode,because they don't want to use their real name and address online.

And also most people don't remember the security question and false postcode they created say two years ago when they opened their account. Which is probably what happened to the OP and why he could not get his account back.

But G Mail and other email providers don't do this.They don't just lock you out of your account for no reason. Only AOL does this it seems.

I can understand AOL being security conscious and wanting to protect customers. But i spent over an hour trying to get back into my account,because I had trouble remembering the security question and false postcode I created for my account a few years ago. I eventually found it by searching my old notebooks.

So now I have dumped AOL over this and I have switched to G Mail.
No wonder people hate AOL.

Johnmcl7

annbarbs wrote: »

But G Mail and other email providers don't do this.They don't just lock you out of your account for no reason. Only AOL does this it seems.

AOL don't lock people out randomly, there will be a reason for it and Gmail will most likely do the same in similar circumstances with plenty of hoops to jump through to get back into the account if at all.

I do sincerely hope you never lose access to your Gmail account and while I've never been a fan of AOL I think it's wrong to trumpet Gmail as a source of greatness just because *you* have had an issue with AOL and not Gmail.

John

System

Well when you register for a G Mail account you have to verify your account with your mobile phone number. That is Google sends a verification code to your phone which you type in the online register form.

I suppose that could be a problem for someone who does not have a mobile phone, but most people have. Also you have the choice of skipping the captcha to verify.And can choose to just verify with your mobile phone number. I had to do this as I could not complete the captcha. Which most people cannot read anyway.

But when you open any email account if you have used a false location and postcode. Because you don't want to give your real address,you must write it down. And also write down the security question and answer you gave them when you created your account.

Because if you ever get locked out of your account,Google or AOL will ask you for those things. And if you don't remember them,then you won't get your account back.

Lesson to be learned. Keep a note of all your account details you gave G Mail or any other service you set up your email account with.

snoden

aol is one of the totalitarian websites out there. they will freeze your account if you log in from a difrent ip address, and force you to change your password. other totalitarian websites are google. they will force you to verify your login via mobile if you are "caught" signing in from a difrent ip. it;s not good enough that you verified it in the past. they realise that peoples phone numbers change. this is how they get your current, up to date phone number. they did that to me, and i just abandoned both my gmail, and aol accounts. there are too many free email accounts out there for me to be bothered with them. thankfully, i never took either of these sites seriously, and dont use them as my main email address. i just used them for junk mail and signing up for things. god forbid that all my friends contacted me via google, or aol. yahoo requires you to input captchas regularly, which i find to be annoying. hotmail also does the captchas. also alot of emails do not get through to yahoo because it gets marked as spammed and deleted automatically. ive been using mail.com, and most emails seem to get through, but i've seen situations where they just delete my account automatically. same thing with gmx. from my experience, the best email services are ones that are outside the western orbit, meaning not based in canada, australia, usa, or europe, but you will have to understand foreign languages to use them. they are also much lesser known.