If you’re like many people, you may have abandoned your old AOL account years ago in favor of a newer, more user-friendly service. But what if you need to get back into that account? Here’s how to do it. First, make sure that you still have the original login information for your old AOL account. If not, you can likely find this information on the web or in a document that your old AOL account was associated with (like an email). Once you have the login information, go to the AOL website and sign in using that information. Once you’re logged in, click on “My Account” in the top right corner of the screen. This will take you to a page where you can see all of your current accounts and settings. On this page, under “Your Accounts,” click on “Your Old Account.” This will take you to a page where you can see all of your past messages and posts (as well as any photos or videos that were attached to them). You can also view any contacts that were saved in your old account. If necessary, you can edit any of these items by clicking on them and then clicking on “Edit.” You can also delete an old account by clicking on its name and then clicking on “Delete Account.” ..
Your account name and password may still work on the current version of AOL’s instant messenger service, AIM (AOL Instant Messenger). If you’d like to chat with old friends from your high school days, that might be worth checking out. Otherwise, you’ll need to create new logins for other services based on your old email address at [email protected] .
If you want to attempt to recreate the old AOL experience, there are some third-party sites that offer the same services and games as AOL used to, such as Instant Messaging, Buddy List, Mail (email), Gaming and AOL Mall.
You can’t download any of your conversations from AIM – it’s a distinct system from your regular IMs, chats, or emails. You won’t be able to find out if anyone has saved or stored any of your messages in plain text either. It’s possible they were logged in plaintext on an IM server somewhere when they were received by another user; however. those logs would be cleared after a certain amount of time , usually 30 days. They’re gone now.
The best solution for getting your old AIM chat logs is to contact the recipient and ask if they still have them saved. If they do, perhaps a file sharing service can be used to share the files with you.
Since there’s no way of knowing if you’re going to be able to recover your data until trying it, I’d suggest researching this process before attempting it. You may want to visit some forums and see what other people have tried, or just try it yourself using some dummy accounts just in case someone does send you their activity logs . Remember that AOL’s terms of service don’t even allow users to transfer any of their account information from their servers over to somebody else; If anyone does send you an archive this way, be sure to delete it once you’ve read and saved your files.
You can’t, legally. Legally, AOL is not required to keep copies of your emails after a certain amount of time has passed. Your account name and password may still work on the current version of AOL’s web mail service; however most people use Gmail or similar services for their online email now.
The only way that you could theoretically access copies of your past emails would be if an employee saved them in plain text logs . They wouldn’t have any way to give them to you without breaking the law, however, so it’s unlikely they’ll help even if they can.
