Oh, fer chrissakes, just give up ENTIRELY on AOL. There is no
good reason at all to subscribe to AOL. There's very little on
AOL that you can't find somewhere on the Internet plus about a
bazillion other things you can grab off the Internet for next to
nothing that's going to cost you something ridiculous like
$4/hour on AOL.
Find a decent Internet Service Provider in your locality (I read
an article today in the Richmond Times-Disgrace er...Times-
Dispatch, that is, that even rural areas of this state have ISP-
hookups these days). You can find a decent ISP that's going to
give you at least a full Unix-style menu account for around
US$20-25 a month, and you can probably get a SLIP account for
under $35/month (and you probably won't even have to pay that
much). Then you can use Eudora, et al to your heart's content.
AOL sucks. As does Prodigy, Compuserve, GEnie, et al. These
"online services" are money pits for people who don't know much
about computers to throw their hard-earned dollars into. The
information-available to dollars-charged ration sucks in
comparison to the Internet proper.
About the only legitimate reason to use AOL/Prodigy/Compuserve is
to access certain commercial databases (like LEXIS/NEXIS, etc.)
which (a) you could haul your but down to your local university
library and access for free probably or (b) will likely be
commercially available via the Internet itself within the next
two years or so.
Forget AOL. It's a dying breed, IMO.
-- Greg Ritter gritter@vcu.edu ritter@urvax.urich.edu http://www.urich.edu/~ritter