Is AOL Mail going away?
No. AOL addresses still send and receive mail. What ended in 2025 was the dial-up internet service, and the headlines blurred the two.
Updated October 2026
Short answer
Do AOL emails still work?
Yes. You can still sign in, read and send mail, and AOL addresses still receive mail from everyone else. When Bending Spoons agreed to buy AOL, its CEO put AOL at around 8 million daily users, according to TechCrunch. An email service that size isn't quietly switched off.
What actually ended in 2025
AOL's dial-up internet, the service that connected a computer through the phone line. AOL ended it on September 30, 2025, together with the AOL Dialer software and the AOL Shield browser. In its notice AOL said the change would not affect any other benefits in an AOL plan. Headlines about AOL shutting down dial-up were easy to read as AOL Mail shutting down. It isn't.
Who owns AOL now
Yahoo sold it. Bending Spoons, an Italian app company, agreed to buy AOL on October 29, 2025, and the sale closed on January 2, 2026. A few weeks later AOL announced 108 layoffs at its office in Reston, Virginia.
None of that changed how AOL Mail works today. It does mean the address now depends on a company that has owned it for less than a year, and new owners make their own decisions.
What about verizon.net addresses?
Verizon handed its customers' email to AOL in 2017, so a verizon.net address runs on AOL Mail and is just as alive. If your mail app stopped working with it, AOL's settings for verizon.net are incoming server imap.aol.com on port 993 and outgoing server smtp.verizon.net on port 465, both with SSL on, and the full address including @verizon.net as the username.
The address your parents have had for decades
In a lot of families, the AOL address belongs to a parent or a grandparent. It's been the same since the 1990s, and it holds twenty years of photos, letters and receipts. Nobody needs to give it up. But nobody should rely on it as the only copy, either.
Two things help. Save a copy of the mail on a computer you control. And give them an address on the family's own domain, like grandpa@smiths.family, next to the AOL one. The family keeps that address whatever happens to any email company, and the old mail can sit in it.
How to save a copy of AOL mail
AOL lets any mail app download the whole mailbox. Five steps, done once, on a computer.
- 1
Create an app password
Sign in to the AOL Account Security page and choose Generate app password. AOL only allows it from a browser that has been used for AOL Mail several days in a row, and not in Incognito mode. Customer care can't override that, so if it refuses, keep signing in to AOL Mail in that browser and try again a few days later.
- 2
Add the account to a mail app
In Apple Mail or Thunderbird, add the AOL address by hand. Incoming server export.imap.aol.com, port 993, SSL on. Username is the full AOL address, password is the app password.
- 3
Keep the mail on AOL
If the app asks whether to "keep mail on the server", say yes, or the messages are removed from AOL as they download. Also make sure it downloads whole messages, not just previews.
- 4
Let it finish
A big account can take several days. AOL says folders with around a million messages or more may not download completely, so split those into smaller folders in AOL Mail first.
- 5
Drag the folders across
Add the new family mailbox to the same app, then drag the old folders into it. The AOL address keeps working, so nothing is lost while people catch up with the new one.
The details come from AOL's own pages: Download your email from AOL Mail and Create and manage app passwords.
Other addresses on the move
AOL is one of several. Xfinity is moving comcast.net mail to Yahoo: what changes, and what to use instead. If your mail already lives at Yahoo, here's how to download it.
One address the family keeps
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