I found AOLMail and have now discovered that I will have to go here for ALL my email purposes. This is not a good thing! This is a big inconvenience for me! Let me explain why. I manage a genealogy web site associated with USGenWeb. USGenWeb is associated with Rootsweb. (If AOL has not checked out the online presence of the genealogical community, I would suggest it do so. It is a large community and Rootsweb is one of the biggest "players".) In addition to the website, I also do my own research. All of this adds up to a fair amount of email. AOL has 'cut me off' twice for sending out too many emails at once. Both times I had to call and remind them that I occasionally send out a high volume of email (like when I'm checking to make sure email addy's are current for the web pages). Hopefully that's noted and I won't have to go through it again. Now to my current problem: Rootsweb changed its format on the mailing lists that I subscribe to and frequently use. It seems that people were sending emails with all types of fancy formatting, instead of plain text, and it was causing problems. We don't all have the same computer capability and folks couldn't read some of the email with the pretty formatting. So they now have a policy. No HTML. It wasn't a problem for me until I upgraded to AOL 6.0, when I purchased my new desktop computer last month. Since then, my postings to the mailing lists have been bouncing. The problem: AOL is formatting my emails in HTML. The solution: Use AOLMail. The problem: See below. The solution: Make it an option, not an assumtion. As the website coordinator, I get a copy of every posting to any of the boards that have been set up on the website. I also get emails from people requesting information or passing along information. The purpose of the mailing list is to facilitate communication. Therefore, I highlight what has been sent to me, either by email or from the board postings, and either send a reply or forward the information. For example: John Jones posts to the query board. I get a copy of his posting. Aha - me thinks! Someone else just posted something on one of the other boards about this family last week! I'll send this on to the mailing list. Hopefully the two people can connect? No can do! Not anymore, unless I go to AOLMAIL, because AOL has chosen to format their email to allow HTML and Rootsweb won't allow HTML format. I cannot highlight text from an incoming email, click on the reply or forward key and have it automatically show up in the email I will be sending. This means I have to do the "cut and paste" thing when replying to a specific statement. I just did this with about six emails. They were all postings to the obit and query boards and I wanted to send them on to the mailing list. It was time consuming and frustrating. My address book doesn't seem to be showing up when I click on it from AOLMail. Now I have to click on the Mail menu, click on Address Book, find the address and copy it so I can paste it in the email. Time consuming and frustrating. I've been with AOL since 1995. Some of the upgrades have been great, a lot of them have been a problem. I went back to the 3.0 version of AOL from 4.0 because of the MIME format that AOL imposed. I never tried 5.0 because it used a different, but similar type of format for email. Needless to say, 3.0 just wasn't cutting it anymore. I have to try and keep up with the times. I couldn't "enable java" and the security domain thing kept popping up and cutting me offline, so I bit the bullet and upgraded to AOL 6.0. First lesson: Where is the print icon? There is no print icon anymore. You have to click on print, then click on print (again) from the drop down menu, then click on "ok" - OR - I can do Ctrl-P, then click on "ok". But this is progress, right? Did you know that there is no option to "send later" from AOLMail? In otherwords, I cannot answer the emails and save them to send later when I'm done looking through all the emails. Sometimes I get two or three emails from the same person. Rather than respond to each email, its proven prudent to wait until I've gone through all of them, then just reply once. So much for efficiency. Questions: -Is AOL capable of meeting my online needs anymore? -Would another ISP provider be able to meet my needs with less frustration and better efficiency? -Will AOL look at the needs of the genealogical online community or just ignore them? I guess the ultimate solution to this problem is going to be up to me. Rebecca Ramsey Rramsey113@aol.com PS: Another problem: Evidently AOLMail closed me down again while I was writing this. That's gonna be a major problem. So how long a period of time do I have to write an email response through AOLMAIL?