With a distinct feeling of nostalgia but otherwise generally a shrug of the shoulders, those that were paying attention heard that AOL is finally shutting down its dial-up service at the end of September. Astonishingly, AOL still has dial-up subscribers so had to announce they were shutting down.
While the demise of dial-up won’t affect any of our clients or their families, this is a good reminder that the free email services of the era of USRobotic Sportster modems also need to be put out of their misery.
If you, or (more likely) any family members still use these old services, names like AOL, SBCglobal, Yahoo, Earthlink, Juno, NTLWorld, Prodigy, and NetZero, you need to migrate off to Gmail or (if you love Outlook) Outlook.com.
The best way to do this is to create your new email address, be sure to enroll in 2-factor authentication on your new email system and be highly suspicious of anything prompting you for your email password. Then, once your new email is set up, put a forward on the legacy system to send all emails to your new account. If you choose Gmail, you can import your old email into your Gmail. Then, as you reply to emails from the new account, people will see your new email address and their contact information for you will be updated. You can also put a footer on your email pointing out that you have a new address.
You’ll also need to go to all your online accounts like Amazon, banks, insurance companies, and utilities, and change your login email to the new one. You have to do this before abandoning the old service.
Finally, search through your old mailbox for anything very personal/confidential and delete it or save it into your Google Drive, because another reason to move off these old systems is that most have been compromised by bad actors, and you want to minimize the amount of your personal information leaking out of them.
Migrating to a current email platform will be some work, but, as with any technology platform, eventually the risks of staying on the old platform outweigh the cost and inconvenience of migrating to a new one, and we are far past this point for AOL.
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