Trying to free my SO from the clutches of AOHell-her PC crashed (HDD failure) and I’ve gotten things mostly rebuilt and advised her to use her ISP (verizon) via OE for future emails.
Yesterday evening I Googled options for importing the AOH addy book into OE and there are no posts newer than 2005-many of them advising that newer AOH iterations don’t make the procedure doable.
Any tricks up your collective sleeves, or do I tell her to slug it out? Many thanks.
What I did was add my AOL mail to my Outlook Express (which also handles my Comcast account). Then the OE address book harvested all of the addresses from the AOL mail.
Please expand upon “add my AOL mail to my Outlook Express”.
Ok sorry.
When AOL went non-pay I decided to simply have Outlook Express handle my AOL mail - that way I don’t even need AOL software on my computer.
I think this is how you do it. In OE, go to Tools then Accounts and choose Add. I called it pop.aol.com. Under General is where you put the email address (Example: SoAndSo@ aol dot com). Also there is a box to check at the bottom of that window to ‘Include this account…’. Check that box.
Under ‘Servers’ choose ‘POP3’ server. The name of the incoming server is pop.aol.com
The name of the outgoing mail server is smtp.aol.com
Next put the AOL screen name and passwords in the proper boxes. You can check the box ‘remember password’ if you want to. Also check the box which says ‘my server requires authentication’. Under ‘Advanced’ I think you ‘use default’.
Next when you ‘recieve all’ it should go out and grab all of the AOL emails.
Hope that helps.
Only problem I see is that if I change the ID and password, verizon’s server won’t recognize the outgoing mail. Or am I being dense?
It makes it a separate account. Let me see if I can find the AOL tutorial I used.
Found it:
http://postmaster.aol.com/imap/express.html
It looks a bit different than what I used, but perhaps it’s been updated. This should set up the AOL inside of OE as a separate mail account, which OE will check for mail in & out. The two mail accounts (Verizon and AOL) should be in a list, one after the other, when you get through. There is a place to make the Verizon one the default, I forget where. One caveat: when you create a new message, check to make sure that the “From” address is the account you want to send message from.
For example, my business email is my Comcast one. My personal email is my AOL one. I make sure that I don’t send stupid jokes out on my Comcast one. 
Can you believe it? – You CANNOT export your AOL address book!!! My aunt recently switched from AOL to Gmail, and I offered to export her AOL address book and import it into Gmail. But upon closer inspection, I discovered that AOL offers no way to export your address book. I googled it and found that this is correct - there is no way to do it!! So I had to sit there and manually copy each contact into her new Gmail account.
This is so crappy - yet another reason that AOL is complete crap.
Why on earth would they offer you no way to do this?? Is it because they want to somehow punish you if you leave them?