How-to: Leave AOL for good

Now AOL offers you more ways to leave! You already knew that you could ditch the horrible AOL client for Mac OS X and use Mac OS X's built-in Mail app (and lots of other mail programs) to get your email using IMAP, right?  But what about everything you've saved over the years in your Personal Filing Cabinet? Will all those email messages you've sent and received... all those Favorite Places you've methodically bookmarked and organized... all those addresses you've added to your AOL Address Book... all be at the mercy of AOL's crappy client forever? NO!

Now you can use the AOL Service Assistant for Mac OS X to import your incoming and outgoing messages from your Personal Filing Cabinet into Mail. You can import your AOL Address Book contacts into your Mac OS X Address Book without bringing in duplicate entries. And you can import your AOL Favorite Places into a folder in the Safari Bookmarks Bar.

Of course you have to still have an active AOL account in order to use this, but once you're done migrating all your stuff, you can say goodbye forever – or just keep the account if you must and ditch the client.