It truly is amazing how AOL can complicate even the simplest of tasks. Take adding a email to your tablet as a example. I use a iPad air 4th generation. The built in mail app has a built in option for AOL. Think it would be as simple as putting in my username and password and away we go? Think again.
So I decided to remove the account and add it again, and thus begins a saga of frustration and annoyance.
For context, I had an issue where a message would appear when trying to load: This message has not been downloaded from the server. Thank you apple for providing such a useful error message...
My password manager cannot fill out the email. Interestingly, the password section does work with Bitwarden... Makes me think AOL did it on purpose, just to annoy me. It's certainly working.
The account is then added, but it looks like it just went back to the login prompt. doing it again gives me an error saying it's already added. I check back, and it still refuses to load messages. Tried rebooting, same thing. I then tried adding it manually. Perhaps AOL decided to update their API and iOS hadn't fixed it yet... At this point, anything's on the table.
So I lookup AOL's IMAP and SMTP settings... And iOS mail claims I didn't give it a password. Even though I did.
I then decide that maybe I should try another email program. On my PC I use Mozilla Thunderbird (Though I've just started using the new interface, Which is quite confusing.), I read that Spark Mail is meant to be good. I install the app, realising I've installed it before, which means I either deleted it because I didn't need it anymore (AKA the good ending) or because they tried to monetise basic features (AKA the bad ending)… Looking at the feature list, It just seems to be a bunch of AI stuff that nobody really cares about and "Blocking unwanted mail"...
Edit: There appears to be more features, but they didn't make that clear...
What, are they going to hold my spam filter hostage or something? One thing's for sure though, the tutorials for it's "Smart" features are already getting on my nerves...
Anyway, getting back to what I was talking about, It wasn't as simple as just putting in a password and letting Spark do it's "AI" magic... Because of course it wasn't. It refused to even try to login. Because Spark needs me to generate a app password. Fine. Google has it too, and I'm pretty sure Microsoft still does. Then I get to see a font they used. I had to paste it into a terminal to be able to read it, because it was difficult to read. Finally, after all of that, I can finally login and download my mail. This took a hour. It should have taken 10 minutes at most.