A Second Look at AIM/AOL Mail Plug-Ins

Random observation: AIM/AOL Mail Web Interface Adopts Celebratory Background for July 4th
While Gmail, Yahoo! Mail and Hotmail/Live/MSN Mail seem to lead in popularity and usage among netizens, AIM/AOL Mail is the only one out of the four major web-based e-mail applications that shows today an incredible backdrop of July 4th fireworks in celebration of the 233rd birthday the U.S.

Review of AIM Mail plug-ins
To be honest, I've only retained my AIM Mail account because of the AIM chat service that is so popular among my U.S.-based friends. Noticing the celebratory gesture on AIM Mail's part, I decided to write about this much overshadowed e-mail service since there were a few improvements. For example, the icons on the left sidebar got a successful makeover, in my opinion, since I am a fanatic of shiny icons. Also, I'm not sure if when the stationery feature rolled out but that's a nice collection. I think the biggest attraction though is that AIM/AOL Mail actually offers a pretty impressive integration of native calendar, to-do, and AIM chat applications inside the email interface. Gmail just recently integrated its calendar and Tasks services as gadgets enabled through Labs, which means there's a possibility that they might not permanently stay in Gmail as they are experimental features. The only feature that's pretty set and integrated (not through Labs) is GTalk that allows you to connect to the AIM chat service.

PROS:

• The To-Do service in AIM Mail allows you to add reminders and notes.
• Reminders can be set up to one week before the event (other options are one or two days before, or on the due date.)
  
• The service is at your fingertips in your email application, which I'm pretty sure most of us check pretty often anyway and can see the reminders without having to go to another website.
• Plug-ins can be removed, but otherwise they can stay in your email interface for as long as you choose, in contrast to Labs features in Gmail which can disappear if developers decide to discontinue them
• There's a variety of plug-ins you can choose from (in Gmail you can only have 5 gadgets in addition to the GCalendar and GDocs gadgets)
  

CONS:

• Of course, the to-do service might not be as sophisticated as Remember the Milk in that you can add tasks from other places, such as your cell phone
  
• You can't link e-mails to to-dos like Gmail Tasks where you can link an email to a task
• I set my own alarm at 11:47pm, a minute from the time I was testing the reminder service, but I didn't get any alerts. Perhaps it was a time zone problem, or maybe I had set the reminder to a very specific time that wasn't in the options for reminders (you could select times by halves, such as 11:30, 12:00, 12:30, etc.)

Overall, the plug-ins make AIM Mail a place for much more potential. And last time I checked, AIM/AOL Mail, as Yahoo! Mail, offers unlimited storage, while Gmail offers 7GB and a bit more, and MSN/Hotmail/Live Mail offers 5GB. Gmail does have a 20MB limit for attachments, while AIM/AOL Mail's limit is 16MB. It's good to see that Gmail alternatives are constantly trying to develop improving features so we as netizens have more choices.

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