You no longer have mail: America Online, keyword RIP

[maumann]

Remember those heady days when Internet monster AOL was able to buy TimeWarner for $182 billion? And Yahoo! bought Tumblr for $1.1 billion? Yeah, that didn't work out so good.

In 1999, AOL had a market cap of $222 billion. Yahoo! was valued at $140 billion in 2000 before its stock went from $475 a share to $8.

Verizon sold off AOL and Yahoo! for $5 billion to Apollo, which probably has no idea what to do with them, either. Too bad the "bad word" dot.com company website that kept track of all the implosions from 2000-2002 doesn't exist any more.

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/03/verizon-sells-yahoo-and-aol-businesses-to-apollo-for-5-billion.html

 

[Neutral Corner]

AOL: The internet with training wheels.

My main email addy is still on yahoo. I've had it for pushing thirty years. It's the fill out the form addy where all the sludge goes.

 

[The Big Ragu]

Verizon paid almost $10 billion combined for them and is now getting out for slightly more than half of that.

As for what Apollo is going to do with it ... given that it is Apollo, the obvious thing will be to use the Yahoo! name to host online sports betting.

 

[wicked]

I still have an AOL email address I’ll check every year or two, to see if anyone has actually emailed (it’s always all spam). I wasted way too much time on there as a kid.

 

[goalmouth]

Oath was a massive fail and worthless after goodwill writedown.

My former boss Tim Armstrong's legacy of nothing.

 

[spikechiquet]

AOL: The internet with training wheels.

My main email addy is still on yahoo. I've had it for pushing thirty years. It's the fill out the form addy where all the sludge goes.

hotmail was my first email address (96, I think?) and it's still technically there via Outlook. I have 2 yahoos that I use for junk mail.
I think there was a joke on Silicon Valley about a guy that still uses his hotmail address. Went something along the lines of: "I thought only grandmas and terrorists used hotmail still..."

 

[Jerry-atric]

Oath was a massive fail and worthless after goodwill writedown.

My former boss Tim Armstrong's legacy of nothing.

He was tremendous as the lead singer of Rancid, as well.

 

[Neutral Corner]

Remember too that AOL was the world's largest supplier of free coasters for the best part of ten years.

 

[garrow]

[email protected]

 

[Slacker]

Back when AOL was king of the world, it had the most user-friendly email system I've ever used.

Still miss hearing this, too ...

 

[Slacker]

 

[Starman]

My main email addy is still AOL -- I've had it since 1994 I think.

 

[User 150927]

Loved the aol chat rooms


My hubby's main email address is still aol

 

[TigerVols]

My main email addy is still AOL -- I've had it since 1994 I think.

You're not alone...just last week I sent emails to 504,000 customers with AOL addresses.

 

[Batman]

I also have an AOL email address. Got it in college in the 90s and just never saw the need for a new one.
Hell, I think I kept my dial-up service with them until about 2010, until the world (and our company's computers) finally went full wireless. I kept it on hand as an emergency backup just in case I couldn't get a Wi-Fi signal out on the road somewhere, or our company's primitive server connection wouldn't work (a not uncommon occurrence with early 2000s technology). In a worst-case scenario I figured I could always log in to AOL and send an email.

So what will happen with .aol email addresses now? After 25 years, I have so many different website accounts attached to that address -- including some very important ones tied to monthly bills and such -- that it's going to be a giant pain in the ass if I have to change them all and set up a new email address.

 

[Starman]

AOL addresses still work; I believe the domain name was sold off some time ago.

 

[HanSenSE]

You're not alone...just last week I sent emails to 504,000 customers with AOL addresses.

My aunt, who's gotta be in her 70s, has a AOL account.

 

[Sam Mills 51]

It's gone?

A-O-hell-no!

 

[maumann]

AOL Instant Messenger was the primary way for us to communicate before Blackberries and smart phones. It was sort of the CB radio of the early Internet, because AOL wouldn't allow most people to use their actual names -- I remember "(your name) is not available. We suggest afskdfhahgj57."

So if you had a significantly large IM contact list, sometimes you'd have to do a double-take when "roseylady241" would ping you, and you'd have to determine if that was a real person and how you knew them.

At least at Total Sports, we all tried to create IMs with "ts" somewhere in the name. I still use "maumannts" for the log-ins for some sites. And even though the news content group sat around a large round table, we rarely spoke out loud, instead preferring to use AIM to communicate. It was always humorous to see somebody suddenly laugh out loud at an AIM joke in an otherwise quiet office.

 

[Songbird]

I can't remember my Excite password and they can't/won't help get it. Excite was my first email address along with CompuServe.