Aol Mail (summer 2012)

By Michael Muchmore

"You've got mail!" is an evocative phrase for us Internet veterans. There was even a movie (an awful one) made with that title. The originator of that phrase, AOL, is no longer the Internet power it was in the late 90s, but this Aol (note the new, non-capped styling) is not the AOL of your forbears. A new design and development team has completely rebuilt the service from the ground up, giving the site a fresh, fun, easy-to-use new interface. You'd be hard pressed to find anything that newer email services can do that Aol Mail can't, but there are still some advantages to using other players, such as our Editors' Choice, Outlook.com.

Interface
When you first arrive on your Aol mail page, you'll see its cleaner, redesigned user interface, with large, clear buttons for common actions, a left-panel with mail folders, with each showing the number of new mails. In the main large center area you'll see Today on AOL, top stories and images of the day's happenings, and current weather and forecast for your area. You can, however, turn all this off in Options if you prefer to go right to the inbox. Even with Today active, a large envelope icon with a number telling you how many new messages you have waiting will open your inbox. You can also get to this with the left-panel Inbox choice, or you can view Drafts, Sent messages, and other folders' contents. The bottom section of the left panel is you AIM instant messaging buddy list?more on that in a bit.

The inbox is easy on the eyes, and unlike Gmail, Aol Mail offers a reading pane that can show you the contents of a selected email below the inbox list, but you can't place the reading pane to the right of the inbox list in the more modern, iPad-y view, as you can in Outlook.com. The list itself offers a few viewing options?Auto, Compact, Comfortable, Relaxed, and Show Message Preview. The first four choices just determine spacing between the message entries, but the last shows the first line of the email.

Gmail and Outlook.com both dynamically update your inbox as soon as a new email arrives, while Aol Mail requires you to hit the Check button to see when new mail is available. This makes it less useful for time-critical scenarios such as small business usage.

You can change the theme for Aol Mail's header area, as you can in Gmail, but the themes are mostly artistic rather than photographic, and you can't just use a solid color the way you can in Outlook.com, or your own photo, as you can in Gmail. Aol's random theme choice should prevent monotony, however, and there's even a "theme suggestion" option, for holidays and such.

But Aol still includes distracting display ads on a left panel. This may be better than the previous incarnation of the service's banner ads across the top, but Outlook.com and Gmail don't distract you with display ads at all.

You can view Quick action icons appear next to an email for flagging or deleting messages. You can view all, just unread, or just flagged messages by dropping down the menu that tells you how many messages await you. But there's nothing similar to Outlook.com's specialized views of just mail from contacts, social network notifications or emails with photos, docs, or shipping updates. Nor does it have an equivalent of Gmail's similar Priority Inbox. Furthermore, you don't get Outlook.com's in-mailbox viewers for photos, videos, or documents.

Aol Mail doesn't include as much in the way of tools that help you tidy up your inbox as Outlook.com does. There is a Spam reporting button, though, can you can create rules to move or delete all mail from a particular sender.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ziffdavis/pcmag/~3/nXdyEJZza1E/0,2817,2112078,00.asp

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