Two big reasons to hate AOL

[dynamite]

4 Months on and i am still paying a monthly fee, even after ringing them up twice and being assured twice I wouldnt be billed again, even my credit card expiring didnt stop them taking money out they simply changed the expiry date and carried on charging me

Actually all they need to do is run your card one time. Unfortunatly they can keep sending in under the same authorization number over and over!
Even if the card is expired they can still send in since they are actually running the card again to get a new authorization number. Also, they probably participate in the VISA Account Updater program where whenever a new card is issued to replace an existing card, VISA is notified, and they pass it along to merchants who subscribe to the service. So in theory you would never have to give them any new card number and they could keep on going forever!

The worst thing I see them do is with people getting signed up with some kind of service that they haven't requested. Most of the time this is something like "Get a FREE credit report". What isn't told to the person is that when you do this you are supposed to be sent something in the mail to cancel your service, otherwise in 30 days you get billed $80-$150. Out of the hundreds of people I have spoken to about this, not a single one has ever received anything in the mail!!! They are real quick to refund these back, but think about this... on average it takes someone 30 days to get their bank statement. If they debit your account the first of the month for $100, and do this to a million people. That equals $100,000,000 in a bank account. If they just earn 2% interest on that amount, even if they gave it all back, they would make $2,000,000 profit!!! Sounds like a scam to me!

[Kwak]

I enjoy receiving their DVD cases also. Hehe.

[DWZ]

Too right, when I moved into my new house I was without dsl for a coupl of weeks so had to use dialup, so i thought i would use a 30 day trial rather than be netless for 2 weeks, closed my account with them the moment I got adsl. 4 Months on and i am still paying a monthly fee, even after ringing them up twice and being assured twice I wouldnt be billed again, even my credit card expiring didnt stop them taking money out they simply changed the expiry date and carried on charging me

Call up bank ask for a charge back? If it's getting too much of a problem, you can blacklist a company, in this case, AOL from charging your account again.

[RichM]

What i dislike is that they claim to be so anti spam, yet they send people real spam through peoples letter box asking them to try AOL. I left AOL years ago and i still get ones saying "re-connect to AOL blah blah blah"

[C.Birch]

my last server was blacklisted by them and if i wanted to get it unlisted i would have had to phone them up about it and get a nice big phone bill and make them more money.

there shoting there selfs in the foot anyway because lets face it at the rate there blocking servers it not be long before aol e-mail address's become useless due to the fact people useing there e-mail can only send but no one can send back because the server there trying to it via is blacklisted lol.

but yes there cd's piss me off also, even get them with most new pcs now.

[Guest]

Ugh I had to rid a machine of AOL a few weeks ago, mom's on eathlink now tho it aint much better.

[djnoz]

Why I hate AOL - rolling IP addresses. If someone wants to sign up to your forums and be a pain, there's no better account to hide behind than an AOL account. You ban them, and they come back, again, and again, and again.

[C.Birch]

Why I hate AOL - rolling IP addresses. If someone wants to sign up to your forums and be a pain, there's no better account to hide behind than an AOL account. You ban them, and they come back, again, and again, and again.

also even if you report the ips and the times they where used so aol knows what user it is they just turn around and basicy say what fo you us to do about it.

like doh its one your user's abuseing your company kick them off you fools, like bt do.

bt are good like that, send them a abuse report with ip's and the times they where used along with info about what that person did and bt will check the ip's up find out what user of theres it was check if they where doing like you reported and if they where that person gets kicked from bt internet for it.

anyway a new server set up and guess what yet its blacklisted.

[rnawky]

They ask youto try for 30 days, then when you call to cancle, there like, "um, i can give you like 30 more days." They did that to me and i said no, then they say 2 months, and keep going up till you give in

[Guest]

Yea they emailed me right after I got the service turned off at moms, thats why they send out so many cd's, once you get on these lists you are on them forever. Newbies just don't understand how bad AOL is, and that most of their important 'added services' can be downloaded and used for free by anyone.

I like AIM however, but it is about the only good thing ive ever seen come out of AOL.

[andrew johnson]

They ask youto try for 30 days, then when you call to cancle, there like, "um, i can give you like 30 more days." They did that to me and i said no, then they say 2 months, and keep going up till you give in

what happens when you wait till end of date = 30 days?

[rnawky]

i think they bill you because u have to put in your credit card #

[hankster]

Reason #3 from Fred Langa at http://www.langa.com

AOL is at it again. This time, it's reading *inside* its members' emails, and preemptively blocking any messages that contain links to sites that AOL doesn't want you to see.

Note: I'm *not* talking about simple mail blocks, where a mail is discarded if it originates from a "forbidden" address. No: AOL is parsing the content of its members' emails and blocking them even if they merely *mention* a site that AOL disapproves of.

This happened to my last newsletter issue, when I mentioned a perfectly valid and inoffensive link: http://www.codeproject.com/ . It turns out that last summer, in July, AOL put that site on its naughty list for some unexplained reason, and ever since has blocked all emails that even contain a link to that address.

When my list-host ( http://dundee.net ) noticed huge numbers of AOL emails bouncing back, they preemptively sought to find out why, and the folks at AOL then removed the block--- on that one address.

AOL's mail system is just this side of insane. Not only does it read inside member emails for links that AOL doesn't like, but--- as we've reported before--- if AOL members get a little lazy and block a newsletter like this one, instead of unsubscribing, AOL keeps track of the blocks. Last time I looked, if as few as 10 readers took the lazy way out of stopping a mailing, AOL would assume that the mail in question was spam. In my case, if just 10 AOL users out of 160,000 readers--- that's 0.00006 of my readers--- took the lazy way off the list, all AOL subscribers would have their legitimate issues blocked for some time thereafter.

AOL's user-level mail filters are nearly useless because the master filters discard emails before they ever make it to the users' mailboxes and the local filters there. That means AOL members can white-list senders to their heart's content but it will have no effect at all on the pre-filtering that's done by AOL before their mail ever gets delivered. AOL's user-level mail controls are a little like those fake thermostats you sometimes see in office buildings that are meant to give occupants the illusion of local control, when in reality, a central system is making all the real decisions.

Noted tech writer Brian Livingston also has been struggling with this, as he reported in http://briansbuzz.com/w/040408/ . Just look at the jaw-dropping failure rates he found:

I've written many times that Internet service providers (ISPs) are mishandling the growing menace of spam by imposing crude "junk-mail filters" that delete legitimate messages without notifying the intended recipients of that fact.

...AOL "bounced" about 88% of the newsletters that had been sent to subscribers who use aol.com e-mail addresses. The problem was also severe at subsidiaries owned by AOL, including cs.com (which bounced 88%) and netscape.net (96%).

...[AOL's] filter simply deletes huge quantities of mail without ever delivering it...
(click link above for full article)

If you have friends on AOL, you may wish to tell them about this ( http://www.langa.com/sendit.htm ) so they'll know why their email is so unreliable. Of course, there's no guarantee they'll see your email, just as there's no guarantee that legitimate subscribers to this newsletter on AOL will get this issue....

But there's a glimmer of hope: For the first time ever, AOL's membership has started to shrink significantly. Users are finally realizing they can get better service at lower costs from other ISPs. Perhaps if enough members vote with their dollars, AOL will wake up and meaningfully change its Big Brother-ish ways.

[Guest]

what happens when you wait till end of date = 30 days?

If you don't cancle the acount I belive they start charing a mothly fee to your credit card, and belive you me, getting that acount cancled is like trying to take a bone away from a pit bull.

[HexOnxOnx]

Yeah they start charging alright. They say you don;t need a credit card any longer to join. You can use a checking account but then they charge you a monthly check charge to do that. I believe you can even have it charged to your monthly phone bill as well. To me as I said in the main post AOL has only been good for getting me members to my site. Beyond that, the people who use AOL are morons, so many of them have no clue how to get pictures online let alone how to attach items in email.