Everybody at aol stopped using it years ago for internal communication and switched to slack.
The team had also been cut down to a skeleton crew a long time ago and they stopped development on it.
The reason why they are killing it as opposed to letting it hang around for ever is that aol has been in a multi-year long process of moving everything to AWS and due to the way aim is architected, it would be a major development effort to make the move, and they just don't want to spend the money.
I'm going to guess the mail product will also face a similar end for similar reasons.
I was amazed the other day to discover my favorite board game publisher, Rio Grande Games, has the email address (posted in their games as of 2017) of riogames@aol.com, which really surprised me. I wonder if they're still making money off of AOL email accounts?
Verizon bought AOL in 2015 [0] and has recently started discontinuing their ISP provided @verizon.net email addresses and servers[1] in favor of @aol.com addresses.
Just this week I've emailed with some contractors for some repairs at my house. Two of the three I received emails from came from an @aol.com email address.
Everybody at aol stopped using it years ago for internal communication and switched to slack.
The team had also been cut down to a skeleton crew a long time ago and they stopped development on it.
The reason why they are killing it as opposed to letting it hang around for ever is that aol has been in a multi-year long process of moving everything to AWS and due to the way aim is architected, it would be a major development effort to make the move, and they just don't want to spend the money.
I'm going to guess the mail product will also face a similar end for similar reasons.