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HOME TOPICS ABOUT ME If AOL Time Warner can't trust AOL mail, why should AOL's customers? |
technofile Al Fasoldt's reviews and commentaries, continuously available online since 1983 Even AOL's parent company can't stomach AOL e-mailApril 3, 2002 By Al Fasoldt Copyright © 2002, Al Fasoldt Copyright © 2002, The Post-Standard I have two warnings to pass along this week. The first is about AOL's inscrutably bad e-mail system. When Time Warner and America Online merged to become one company, the 82,000 employees of the new company were forced to switch to AOL e-mail. The fact that AOL's e-mail system is substandard meant nothing to the folks who made that decision. But it does now. AOL Time Warner has decided it's had enough. Last week, the company's top management told AOL Time Warner's divisions to use whatever mail software they wanted. A report from the Dow Jones News Service said AOL Time Warner employees had major problems with AOL's mail system. "The e-mail software frequently crashed," the story said. "Staffers weren't able to send messages with large attachments, they were often kicked offline without warning, and if they tried to send messages to large groups of users they were labeled as spammers and locked out of the system. Sometimes, e-mails were just plain lost in the AOL etherworld and never found. And if there was an out-of-office reply function, most people couldn't find it." I've said for years that AOL's e-mail system is badly designed. I realize a lot of you like AOL, and you might even like it because the mail is easy to use. But I'll keep urging you to switch to an Internet provider that uses a standard e-mail system. The difference, as AOL Time Warner itself knows, can make a big difference. Besides, if AOL Time Warner can't trust AOL mail, why should AOL's customers? The second warning is about Microsoft's inhospitable new Web browser, Internet Explorer 6. For reasons I can't quite figure out, the company that gave us Internet Explorer 5 -- surely the best Web browser a Windows user could hope for, especially in version 5.5 -- has disgorged the regrettable Internet Explorer 6.0. Stay clear of it. Don't upgrade from any other version to 6.0. If you already have 6.0 because your PC runs Windows XP, stick with what you have. But all the rest of us who are not running Windows XP (I use Windows 2000, for example) need to stay clear of this bundle of trouble. I don't have the space to list all the problems users have reported to me. Trust me on this one; IE 6 is a big mistake. When Microsoft gets IE 6 right, I'll probably recommend it. But not now. |