This may sounds about 10 years late, but I’ve got plenty of family that uses AOL for their primary email.  WIth all the other free options that are far more lightweight (gmail obviously), the only reason that people use AOL email is because they’ve had it for 10+ years and don’t want to retell the 10 people they send forwards to that their email address has changed.  I will admit to having an aol.com email address that I haven’t paid for personally ever (it was on my family’s account until it went free) that i’ve had since 1995.  I check it around once a year.

Until somewhat recently, AOL did not provide pop3 access to AOL and AIM email.    Without fanfare (or apparently I’ve missed it), AOL does now have pop3 access in addition to IMAP.

http://help.channels.aol.com/topic.adp?topicId=ART_217449

Why is this so important?   Gmail supports pulling from a pop3 server, so now you can stop logging into AOL for email.   And by you, I mean your less tech savvy family and friends that refused to make the change.  Gmail seems to already even put in all the settings for you so you don’t even need to manually do it.

Its pop.aol.com for @aol.com address and pop.aim.com for @aim.com addresses (obviously less common) if you wanted to use some other application.

So, here is my challenge to you - go out and convert all of your family and friends who still use aol email addresses and go to a better provider!