Fuck you, AOL.

My wife has a basic AOL account (the free one) that got hacked the other week, and after she got control of the account back, all of her mail was going to trash.

So she called AOL support and asked how to fix it.

Long story short, they told her she’d have to pay for them to fix it.  We just need your credit card, ma’am, because you’re not a Gold Member (or whatever they call it now).  To make a short story shorter, she told them, “fuck off, you’re as bad a scammer as the guy who hacked my account.”

So she’s been trying to move over to Gmail and telling people to write to her there, and of course nobody is paying attention and just responding to her AOL account.

I am NOT technical support after hours, but I finally got tired of hearing her complain about it and went into her accounts to try to fix things.

First of all, I found out that the hacker had created a filter sending all of her inbound mail to trash.  AOL had actually told her that but I guess it didn’t translate back through her to me.  So I killed the filter and moved all of her trash back into her inbox.

Next, I solved the problem of people writing back to her at AOL; I made her a vacation message that says “don’t write to me here, write to me there.”

There’s apparently no way to set up an account forward (figures since it’s the free account) so now I have to figure out how to download her mail.  Using the Gmail method of importing from the other account apparently doesn’t work because AOL doesn’t extend POP privileges to free accounts.  It might download with IMAP to Outlook, but I don’t hold out much hope for that.

AOL, you coulda been a playa, but your service sucks.  May you soon be out of business and out of our hair.