AOL: All Your E-Mail In One Place
Users will be able to access e-mail accounts from Yahoo, Gmail, and Hotmail on their AOL homepages. A Mail Preview Panel feature will allow users to see new e-mails when they arrive in their AOL, Yahoo and Gmail accounts. The Mail Preview Panel feature isn't available yet for Hotmail accounts.
"With the launch of mail aggregation, AOL will be the first among the big traditional portals to offer a centralized email experience," said Bill Wilson, Executive Vice President of Programming, AOL, in a statement. "We know that consumers today have multiple email accounts on different services to keep tabs on daily, and we want to make it easier for them. This is an important first step in opening up AOL.com and giving users the ability to populate the AOL.com homepage with content and services they use on a daily basis, regardless of where it lives."
AOL also launched a redesigned homepage, with the intention of integrating more social networking features and third-party content over the next eight weeks. AOL.com will open up for the first time to outside services such as Bebo, Facebook, MySpace and Twitter.
"For a portal to be relevant to consumers today, it has to recognize that users seek a variety of different experiences and connections with their various networks and information sources," said Wilson.