![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.heliotropicsystems.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/AOLDesktopGold-197x300.jpg\")
<\/p>\nYou may have received \u2013 or in all likelihood will receive \u2013 an email from AOL that reads, in part:<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Thanks to one of my clients for forwarding this email to my attention. I had not heard of this before now, so I did some research.<\/p>\n
From what I have read in a variety of online forums, this software is a complete travesty. It functions poorly, doesn\u2019t address the needs of most users, and is subject to frequent crashes and computer freezes despite the (supposedly) frequent updates from AOL.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m not certain what they were thinking \u2013 other than asking hundreds of thousands of older adults for $4.99 a month to be able to send and receive emails \u2013 but for those of you who have not paid anything for AOL for years, this is a pretty drastic change.<\/p>\n
AOL is saying that because they will now offer two-step verification, your AOL account will be more secure. They will be encrypting the emails that are saved on your hard drive so that no one will be able to read them, thus providing you with more protection. And, because you are a paying customer, you\u2019ll have access to their tech support (definitely not<\/strong> US-based).<\/p>\n So, what should you do?<\/p>\n I am going to recommend that you DO NOT install this software unless you<\/em> want the headache(s) of dealing with it. If there ever was a time to break free of the AOL desktop software, it is now. It should not be too difficult, but I\u2019m going to cover the available options \u2013 and there are only three.<\/p>\n First, you can opt to sign up to receive the new AOL Desktop Gold software. You must have an existing AOL account and (at some point) you\u2019ll have to provide your credit card for the monthly $4.99 charge. The first 30 days are free.<\/p>\n Now I called AOL customer support, and after waiting about 20 minutes for a representative, I asked about that little asterisked statement at the bottom of the email. The one that reads, \u201cTo avoid being charged the recurring subscription fee, simply cancel before the free-trial period ends.\u201d This means exactly what it says. You can decide you don\u2019t want to pay for this new software before you get charged. And when you tell AOL that, the software will stop working. Seriously. You won\u2019t be able to access your emails \u2013 or your contacts. And you won\u2019t be able to go back to the old desktop software version because the new one has scrambled the crap out of your emails. This is a one-way ticket. I warn you not to do it. If you run into a problem after you install this, I won\u2019t be able to help you \u2013 you\u2019ll have to call AOL tech support for help.<\/p>\n Second, you can keep your old software and use AOL in a browser. You will have 30 days from when you receive this email notification until your desktop software will no longer work in terms of sending or receiving email. So you can decide to bite the bullet and use a web browser to work with your new emails, as millions of people do. This isn\u2019t a particularly awful transition, because things are pretty much where you expect them. And it is still AOL and all of your stuff is there for you.<\/p>\n Your existing desktop software will continue to let you access all of your email that was \u201cSaved to my PC.\u201d You will be able to use any browser (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, or Safari) to access your mail directly at http:\/\/mail.aol.com<\/a>, where all of our \u201cSaved to AOL\u201d mail exists, as well as your contacts. I\u2019m sure at least one of you is going to be curious and ask: Can I archive my old mail? The answer is: Sure you can; but you have to do it one at a time. There is no automated mechanism. You have to open the email, select File, then chose the type to save it as, and then you have to use a unique name for each one. If you have thousands of emails, you\u2019ll have to work non-stop throughout those 30 days just to get a small portion of them saved. Not worth the effort\u2026<\/p>\n Third, you can give up using AOL and use another email service. And this means changing your email address, which I know is a horrifying thought. The two free services that I suggest looking at are Outlook.com and Gmail.com. Changing your email address means that you would have to contact everyone you know to say, \u201cHey here\u2019s my new email address.\u201d You\u2019ll also have to update any website where you sign in, and update any email subscriptions, and your phone and tablet. It is a huge effort, but I wanted to cover all the options. Irrespective of which one you chose, you can save your existing AOL contacts and import them.<\/p>\n Outlook, provided by Microsoft, is a free service that uses the same enterprise infrastructure that Microsoft uses for Fortune 100 companies. Only because you are not a company, you will receive AOL-like ads in your email. You can reduce some of them by using the privacy features in the profile settings. The web interface is clean and pretty straight-forward.<\/p>\n Gmail is offered by Google. It is free; it can be accessed on any web browser anywhere as well as on mobile devices. Similar to AOL, it is not ad-free. The company will display targeted ads; only not based on your activities in Gmail, but instead on things like your Google searches, the YouTube videos you watch, the apps you use, and the websites you visit. You can opt out of those targeted ads \u2014 but not Google’s data collecting \u2014 by turning off \u201cad personalization\u201d in your personal Google settings.<\/p>\n There you have it, three not so great possibilities, but that\u2019s the way of the email world in 2017.<\/p>\n AOL is rolling out this change in waves, so it may be some time before you receive the notice. I just wanted you to be aware of what\u2019s going on, and to prepare for it.<\/p>\n Any questions, let me know in the comments.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Introducing AOL Desktop Gold You may have received \u2013 or in all likelihood will receive \u2013 an email from AOL that reads, in part: Thanks to one of my clients for forwarding this email to my attention. I had not heard of this before now, so I did some research. From what I have read …<\/span> Read More →<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[44,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-252","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-aol","category-everyone"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.heliotropicsystems.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/252","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.heliotropicsystems.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.heliotropicsystems.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.heliotropicsystems.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.heliotropicsystems.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=252"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.heliotropicsystems.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/252\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":255,"href":"https:\/\/www.heliotropicsystems.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/252\/revisions\/255"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.heliotropicsystems.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=252"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.heliotropicsystems.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=252"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.heliotropicsystems.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=252"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nAll of your downloaded email attachments can be accessed through the Download Manager in your old version of the AOL Desktop software, or through Windows Explorer in the folder where the files were originally saved.<\/p>\n