Do you still have some old AOL email addresses?

If you're like me, you still have one or two AOL email addresses that you keep because someone from your past might try to contact you with one of them. In the meantime, those email boxes fill with spam, discouraging you from every checking for that long-lost contact's email.

Some time ago, AOL offered IMAP accesses to email. I've never totally liked IMAP - I like the control of knowing that my email is on my PC; that I can delete it; I can back it up; etc.

Well, recently I stumbled across an AOL page that described how to access it via POP3. Finally, I can bring my AOL email into Outlook, apply my rules and junk mail filters, and treat it like the rest of my email - i.e., consolidating it all into one email client.

I don't know why AOL hasn't advertised this, but they haven't.

You can add an AOL email address to Outlook by following the instructions at http://about.aol.com/faq/openmailaccess. The incoming server is pop.aol.com and the outgoing SMTP server is smtp.aol.com. The incoming port is 110 and the outgoing port is 587, and the outgoing server requires authentication.

You can even use GMAIL to collect all your POP3 mail, now including AOL, and bring it all into one easy-to-search environment.