I’ve had my aol account over 25 years. I had their service back in the DOS days, but not since. I’m not sure I follow when you say you use their browser now. I use chrome to check my AOL email. No need to change email address. I also can use seamonkey to check my gmail or any of my other various accounts. Also Thunderbird can go and get the mail from most of my accounts if I want to set it up to do so.
I browse the internet while on AOL is what I should have said. They use a google assisted browser but AOL seems to affect how well they run. I can’t play scrabble on facebook while signed into AOL for instance.
It’s not even a given that your previous e-mail provider has a procedure in place that prevents your previous e-mail address being assigned to a new customer later (with addresses based on name and firstname/lastname combos that are common that’s a real risk). In that case people who send e-mail to your previous address won’t even get a bounce.
That’s one reason I insist that employees have a personal email address, in addition to their company account.
Which is why we so often hear, “Engineer_comp_geek has left the building!!!”
That’s a fine solution when you first create your first email address.
It doesn’t solve the OP’s problem that after 25 years and gosh knows how many people, businesses, websites, etc., having his address, he wants AOL to forward HoneyBadgerDC@AOL.com to someplace else forever after at no cost to him.
Agree that once he is using his own domain name he can later change his email supplier from Google to Apple to Microsoft to Comcast to … transparently.
But that first step is a bitch.
You are doing AOL dialup for your internet? Or you’re running the AOL desktop? AOL toolbar? AOL app? Like I said, I’m not fully following where you are leading. BTW I see they also have a Firefox branded browser.
All of which is not important if you are leaving aol for another provider. You can keep your AOL email unless they change the rules.
Which is why some of us took it the second time an ISP folded, jacked its rates, merged or otherwise forced us to lose that critical online anchor.
I’d guess that a GMail address will be good for pretty much the life of email, but that’s a latecomer and it can be difficult to get it away from sources you don’t want to use it.