I have AOL as my email provider. It was not by choice: Verizon handled my email (I get about 300 non-spam emails a day) but sold their business to AOL, which is why I have a jamproethics@verizon.net address. AOL is clunky, but I depend on email, and having to change over my address promises to be a disaster, losing me clients who are increasingly precious commodities. When Grace died, several clients who were supposed to always copy me in on messages to her didn’t, and moved on to other (and lesser) ethics trainers. So I have, though sheer inertia, kept my AOL account while paying the reasonable yearly fee.
But this month, the provider decided to force me and other users into paying them more. A third of my email home page is now taken up with obtrusive, often animated ads. If I click on an “expand” button to restore the page to the readable status it once was automatically, I get a message inviting me to pay for “ad free” email. Then the screen goes back to its ad-cluttered format. I can only “expand” three (or four: I haven’t counted) times before AOL informs me that I have exhausted my daily quota (of returning to the screen format I had been paying for), and that my only option is to pay extra to end the annoying interference.
It’s even worse than that. Periodically one of the ads blasts out a soundtrack at many decibels, so I have to keep my speakers off to avoid it scaring the hell out of me or interrupting a phone conversation. Worse still, the animated ads interfere with my composing my own emails: I’m in the middle of typing a word when I notice the key strokes aren’t registering. This happened so frequently while I was writing a long email last night that I gave up and composed the thing on Notebook.
AOL is essentially engaging in a bait-and-switch extortion scheme. It drastically reduced the quality of its service and I am supposed to pay extra to remove deliberate obstacles to efficient, user-friendly email use. Oh, I’m sure there is some fine print in an endless contract I “signed” at some point allowing them to do this; I’m sure AOL could start pulsing its pages strobe-style too, or force me to listen to the Strawberry Alarm Clock’s moronic “Incense and Peppermints” while I’m checking my messages.
Well, it can bite me. I won’t tolerate being treated like this, and as soon as I can figure out how to get off AOL without losing the email address I’ve had for decades, I will.
Ethics Alarms 
This is a nice example of enshittification. The term enshittification was named word of the year in Australia in 2024, and it describes the process where platforms and services that decline in quality, service, and user experience, for the benefit of the company that provides these services. Sadly enough this process is very common.
Has Ann Althouse done one of her pedantic posts on this word? It sounds right don her alley.
Cory Doctorow coined this term according to Wikipedia. The Wikipedia page (see linked below) is quite informative about this phenomenon.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification
I’d criticize the opening premise of the wiki over the fact that it claims it is only an online phenomenon.
The restaurant industry is widely famous for enshitificaiton. Red Lobster and The Olive Garden are perfect examples of large chains. With smaller establishments, it is quite common for a founding proprietor to sell off their successful business, and when new owners come in, the ride the popularity down.
There are plenty of other examples; airlines, resorts, cruise lines….
If/when you get another email you might be able to set up the old one to automatically forward the messages to it while you gradually wean people off the old one and on to the new one. The ads will not be forwarded.
However, I also know it’s a real pain to get people to transition to a new address as the old address will pop up when they type your name — I have been completely unable to get my elderly mother to send me email at my preferred address. I’ve given up after years of trying…
That is how handled the issue with Verizon. I just had all mail forwarded to my new address. Now the only mail being forwarded is inconsequential.
Sorry to hear you are going through that; you are not alone.
Unfortunately, I do not believe you’ll be able to move to another service and keep the email address. I’m sure you can contact AOL and try to finagle some result, but I don’t think you will be successful.
You could setup a new email address with Gmail, Yahoo, or Outlook. I have not used AOL email in years, but if you can auto-forward all of your email to the new email address, you can, over time, let people know to stop using the old email address. You can probably also setup an auto-reply so that anyone sending an email to the old address will get a response that their message has been forwarded and that you have a new email address.
Good luck dealing with this AOL nonsense; it’s a pain!
FYI; if you were to switch over to use Gmail as your primary email account, you can easily access the Version email within Gmail interface that way people who use the Version account can still communicate with you as they always have. You can slowly transition customers away from the Version email address and towards Gmail address. You can access Gmail online from any computer that’s connected to the internet no matter what the internet provider is.
I’ve used Gmail for many years and find it, and some the other apps that come along with the Google account (word processing, spreadsheets, Drive online file storage), to be very useful tools and it all fits my needs.
Google reads you mail. I tell my legal ethics classes that it is irresponsible for lawyers to use if for business becaise doing so puts confidential information at risk. The government forbids the use of email. It wants its illegal leaks to be intentional….
Jack,
You should never trust the contents of any email as being “secure” regardless of the email platform. There maybe a few genuinely secure email platforms out there that has true end-to-end encryption but they’re generally expensive to use. Anything that requires “eyes only” kind of security should be transferred via other methods, like secure PDF’s through secure servers, where you attach a link to secure document that’s on a secure server and it’s only available for a short time and only accessible with proper authentication.
Generally speaking, don’t trust the contents you type into any email to be “secure”.
I have a verizon.com email address too, but I don’t use the AOL app and didn’t know it had gotten obnoxious. If you have Outlook, you can configure it to receive and send email with your Verizon.net email address. The first step is to go into the AOL app and have it generate an “app password” that you provide to Outlook when you set up the AOL account there. Just Google “how to connect outlook to aol mail” to get the details.
Thanks so much. I hope I can maneuver that…
My family uses Thunderbird published by the Firefox Web browser. It doesn’t have ads or read email.
The below link has the info you might need to configure it. This info would also work for Outlook or other mail apps.
https://help.aol.com/articles/how-do-i-set-up-other-email-applications-to-send-and-receive-my-verizon-net-mail
Hi Jack:
I suggest you set up a stand-alone email client such as Thunderbird or one of the other excellent similar clients for Windows. You can even use Outlook if you have the stand-alone version, and connect to your email via the IMAP protocol. Then, you can avoid the web client and attendant audio-visual ad pollution.
I looked around and you do have to set up an “app password” for AOL/Verizon accounts, but it shouldn’t be that hard to do.
I don’t do it because despite it’s spying, gmail works fine for me. I also have a second account I pay for in case I need to avoid Gmail.
Have you tried an app like adblock? It blocks most ads, including video, pretty well, though some services are finding ways to slip ads through.
Jack,
This sort of thing is right in my wheelhouse. If you need help with it, let me know. For you, I’ll even make a house call.
This sort of thing, BTW, is why long ago I invested in getting my own domain name and setting up my own email servers that run on hardware in my own house. Understandably, not everyone can feasibly do this (y’know, unless you’re the Secretary of State or something), but with my background in I.T. it is, again, right in my wheelhouse.
I really REALLY hate the intrusion of ads into everything. If I’m paying for something, then I am your customer goddammit, and if the advertisers are your real customers then you’d better stop fucking charging me for the service.
–Dwayne