one little gotcha...
...in my aol communicator hacking. after changing all my aol type accounts to imap accounts as noted in the last post, i tried to add another non-aol account:
wups - won't let you add any of those until at least one "valid" aol type account is already present. so i reversed the changes i had made for one account i don't use and for which mail is turned off anyway, and that solves that. "valid" is just an empty, scary word, i guess. i'm not sure this would have worked if i tried to create a new aol type account from scratch.
update on the smtp issue: i can't seem to get anything sent out through aol's smtp server. yes, i'm using smtp.aol.com:587. yes, i have the right smtp credentials. i keep getting the following:
so i guess another smtp server will have to do. might work if you were dialed in through aol, though. what this probably means is that you can't send mail from an aol account in aol communicator, since i would bet that most smtp servers would reject mail from a "foreign' account, even if the smtp login credentials were ok. if not rejected, any one of the receiving systems, all the way down to a mail client, could flag it as spam for having a "spoofed" from address. and finally, even if it gets through, it could still look as if it came from the account associated with the smtp server used instead of the aol account. so specifying a "reply-to" is a good idea if you go this route.
here's a note from the old aol mail faqs for imap:
"You do not need to use the AOL SMTP server, but your message will not appear in your AOL Sent Mail and may be blocked by filters that do not believe AOL members should be sending email without using the AOL SMTP server."
those faqs are fairly old, so take care with some of the information they contain. for example, retention & space usage rules have almost completely changed.
a note on imap vs. pop3: i could have done either, but imap was much closer to the old aol type access. also, aol communicator doesn't seem to have pop3 over ssl configurable, in case that was an issue.