Aol to provide personalised e-mail addresses

AOL (America Online) announced on 9th August of the launch of its new service called AOL® My eAddress. The service planned to be launched in September will allow anyone to set up a completely personalised .COM or .NET e-mail address (upto 100) for NO CHARGE at all!
This address will be a gateway that could be used to access any and all of the AOL services just like Google and Yahoo! currently provide. Considering the fierce competition on the web AOL has also planned to give away 5GB of FREE storage!

"AOL is about to make online communications more personal than ever before," said Roy Ben-Yoseph, Director of Communication Products, AOL. "The most popular Internet activity is email, yet many people don't have an online identity that's truly personal and meaningful to them. Starting next month, with the launch of its My eAddress service, AOL will make personalized email domains available to all online users at absolutely no cost. Not only can people customize an email address with their own personal domain and connect up to 100 other identities, giving families, teams, social organizations and small businesses a new way to represent themselves, but they'll also be able to use it for instant messaging and as a Web page address. This is an opportunity that millions of people have been waiting for, and AOL is thrilled to be the first to provide it."

AOL has planned this service as a complement to its latest AOL.com and AIM.com mail products.

Among the features that will be available with the free AOL My eAddress service:

• -- Ability to completely customize an email address using a personalized .COM or .NET domain and identity, e.g., "you@thenameyouwant.com."
  
• -- Setup, registration and the use of a My eAddress email domain and identity is all free (one domain per user), as is the ability to invite other people to join their personalized domain. Each account holder can add up to 100 additional personal email identities associated with their domain, all managed through an easy Web-based control panel.
  
• -- Ability to check email from My eAddress and AOL.com domains through one mailbox accessible from the Web at www.aol.com, open mail clients (like Outlook and Thunderbird) that use the IMAP protocol, and through the new beta version of the AOL "Streamliner" product.
  
• -- Industry-leading spam and anti-virus protection to help keep a user's email box free from junk mail and harmful viruses.
  
• -- 2 GB of email storage, which can be accessed from any Web-enabled computer, and a search feature that makes it easy for users to find messages in their personal mailbox, sent mail, or stored mail.
  
• -- An Address Book that also includes presence indication to see when contacts are online and able to receive instant messages.
  
• -- Integrated access to AOL's other free Web-based products and services, including AOL® Calendar and, coming soon, AOL® Pictures, a comprehensive online digital picture service that offers free and unlimited storage of digital photos.

Now this is what I call HEALTHY COMPETITION....!