If you'd prefer not to subscribe to AOL Desktop Gold anymore and would like to use the service exclusively via the AOL.com website at no cost, please contact AOL Support directly and inform them of your decision. If they claim they still are using the standalone AOL program, then most likely they have been doing so through AOL Desktop Gold and just have not realized the update has taken place, since Gold and Desktop look and work similarly to one another. If your friends still are using their AOL email addresses, then chances are they are accessing their accounts through the web at AOL.com and not through a standalone program as before. The following article on the AOL Help website discusses the free options found through AOL.com: This includes web-based access to your AOL email account, your address book and any web-related features available through AOL.com (like AOL Search and AOL Video). It should be noted all free services available through AOL Desktop Gold (outside of Instant Messenger, which no longer exists) also can be accessed for free via AOL.com. Please see the following article on the AOL Help website for more information on this: It also carries a $4.99 per month price tag, whereas most previous versions of AOL Desktop were free to use.īecause this was a system-wide change to the service, there's a good chance your friends on AOL also received notification of this update - only they may not have seen the message for one reason or another (ignored it, deleted it before reading it, sent it to SPAM, etc.). While Gold looks and works similarly to the original AOL Desktop, it lacks some of the latter's major features, most notably AOL Instant Messenger, which was shuttered by the company in late 2017. Why is that?Ī: In 2017, AOL opted to shut down its self-contained AOL Desktop program for a more streamlined version of it, called 'AOL Desktop Gold.'Īccording to AOL ( ), the new version is 'more secure and faster' than previous versions of the product, contains a two-step verification process for sign in and setup, houses an updated web browser and more. However, all my friends who use AOL said they did not receive this message and that they are still using the free version without issue. Well, that’s exactly what happened, so I signed up with them. Some months ago I received a message from AOL saying that if I did not move to their new AOL Desktop Gold product (for $4.99 a month), then I would be dropped from their service. Then I was told that a free version was available, and I switched to that - and I kept using that version for years.

In the beginning I was paying $40 a month to use the service. Q: I have been an AOL user since I acquired my first computer in the '90s.

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