setting up mail with an aim.com email

Question:
If you're setting up an "AIM" account, wouldn't the incoming mail server be imap.aim.com? Wouldn't the outgoing mail server be smtp.aim.com? The settings are correct for setting up an "AOL" account.

iMac Mac OS X (10.4.7)

If you are referring to an AOL email account, you can't create an AOL email account as a POP type account with the Mail.app or with any email client.

You can create an AOL account as an IMAP type account with the Mail.app and with other email clients but I'm not sure this is supported by AOL with a free AOL email account.

You can create a gmail email account as a POP type account with the Mail.app and with other email clients by selecting POP forwarding or some such via your gmail account preferences at the gmail website.

You can create a Yahoo email account as a POP type account with the Mail.app and with other email clients as long as the account is a paid account. Yahoo prevents accessing a free account with any email client for U.S. residents. I believe a paid Yahoo email account costs only $20/year.

As a followup to Allan's earlier post regarding AIM Mail POP3 and IMAP, I answered a similar question in this manner:

It's pretty clear from a cursory look at it, the AIM Mail is AOL's branded web mail product, and that they intended that it be read primarily using a web browser. You can configure a Mail account to read AIM Mail using IMAP technology and settings like this:

account type: IMAP
description: AIM Mail (or any other representation you choose to appear in Mail)
incoming mail server: imap.aol.com
electronic mail address: < AOL screen name or AIM identifier >@aol.com
full name: <your first and last names>
user name: <AOL screen name or AIM identifier>
password: <your password>

outgoing mail server: smtp.aol.com
server port: 25 (this is selected automatically and is not see initially during setup)
authentication: password
user name: <AOL screen name or AIM identifier>
password: <your password>

Those settings worked for me, though the SMTP via SSL service was selected automatically when I configured the mail box and enabled secure connections, so port selection was not required. If you choose to later edit this account, you'll see that 25 was selected by default.

Remember that with IMAP, your AOL mailboxes on each client are effectively 'synchronized' so that removing a message on the AIM Mail web page will delete if from the IMAP mailbox on your Macintosh.

Welcome to Apple Discussions.

I suppose it depends upon your perspective, but—from the client end—incoming mail is handled by a POP3 or IMAP server, and outgoing mail by an SMTP server. The 'in' and 'out' here refer not to the directional flow from a single point, which happens for both server and client in a bidirectional manner, but rather to 'inside' and 'outside' your mail domain. Conventionally, server <---> server transactions are SMTP, and server <---> client transactions are either POP3 or IMAP.

In the case of AIM Mail, which is simply AOL web mail, it is the AOL servers which handle the mail transactions, not the AIM servers, which are apparently dedicated to handling instant messaging transactions. In fact, when you access AIM Mail on the web, the URL looks something like this:

http://d03.webmail.aol.com

Assuming that the required services are running on each domain, they could have chosen to do it either way, but they apparently decided that AIM Mail (possibly an unfortunately named product because of the suggestion that it is messaging and not mail) would run in the AOL domain, not the AIM domain.

I haven't tried to use AIM Mail through AIM servers - I just dug up what little documentation there was about using AIM Mail with other clients and applied it to Mail under OS X.

AOL has gone a little crazy with this AIM branding thing, even now offering a free AIM Phoneline: an inbound only, route to voicemail if not answered, and access from AIM Mail or AOL telephone service, with a legitimate prefix and telephone number in your US area code. Strange. But I might just get one - after all, it's free…