My first article in this series generated several emails from folks incredulous that I would suggest using AOL under any circumstances. I appreciate these readers' cries of alarm, and here's my reply.
I consciously chose not to get into a discussion of AOL in my initial article. In retrospect, that was a mistake. Too many readers may have inferred that if Lee says AOL is okay for a backup plan, it must be okay for general use. In my opinion, it's not okay for general use, but under certain very specific circumstances it can provide a safety net (more on this in a moment). I never had any direct empirical evidence that AOL was causing system instabilities, only that it had what I considered a poor user interface and bad technical support. The "bad UI" judgment was easy to make; AOL connection software is proprietary, frenetic, and laden with "eyeball traps" that simply shouldn't be part of a paid-for online connection experience. I made the bad technical support judgment based on the experiences of numerous clients and friends, all of whom reported extensive problems with the service, but I had never used it myself. (As you'll read in a moment I now have my own bad AOL experiences to lament.)
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