AOL To Offer Free Email Domains

AOL again expands its new slate of free services, now offering free personalized email domains to all Internet users.

It used to be, AOL might tempt you with thousands of free minutes on its service, but otherwise the company wouldn’t give you the time of day without a monthly subscription agreement. Now, the company seems to want to offer everything for free, starting with its email and Web services, then 5 GB of online storage, then free antivirus software. Well, in September, AOL will up the ante again with AOL My eAddress.

Under the program, AOL says anyone will be able to set up customized email addresses using available domains in either the .com or .net top-level domains, and add up to 100 additional "identities" for themselves or other users of their domain at no charge. Users can also set up new email addresses in the aol.com domain at no charge. Addresses created using AOL My eAddress will function for both email and AIM instant messaging, and (eventually) as the address of a personal Web page on AOL’s AIM Pages social networking service.

AOL My eAddress is Web-based, and users will be able to change email from their AOL My eAddress and aol.com addresses through a single mailbox via aol.com, although AOL said the service will also be accessible to IMAP mail clients. Users are limited to one .com or .net domain apiece (presumably because AOL has to front the registration fees for new domains, which is about $10 a year for typical users, but AOL may well have struck a deal with registrars to bring that cost down). AOL will apply is antispam and antivurus technologies to mailboxes hosted on the system, and users will have up to 2 GB of free email storage at their disposal.