[rimunroe]

I have a still-functional though no longer in active use AOL account which I think is from ~1996 when I was ~9. My parents were subscribers so it was created as part of their family account.

By the late 2000s I had migrated to Gmail and was only using my AOL account for AIM. One day a friend texted me to ask if I might have been hacked. It turns out my mom's account--and thus those of mine and my siblings--had been compromised. We'd not been subscribed for a very long time, and AOL customer support for account recovery was basically non-existent for non-subscribers.

My brother happened to know Adrian Lamo[1]. Adrian still knew people on AOL's security team from when he was a thorn in their side. He was able get our accounts restored and enable additional protections for our accounts. I did a short phone call with him after it was done and thanked him for being so much more helpful than AOL. His response was, "I try to provide better customer support than the people I hack."

I haven't used that account for anything other than recovering other ancient accounts of mine since AIM was shutdown, although I wasn't using it very frequently by then anyway. Friends had long since migrated to other platforms.

[1] This was probably 1-2 years before he turned in Chelsea Manning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adrian_Lamo

[RajT88]

I too have an AOL account from 1996. I used to occasionally IM people with it until about 2015, but haven't actually emailed anyone with it since I can't remember when. 2008? It's definitely my oldest account.