AOL

Karen's computer got taken over by a scammer who convinced her that he was from AOL when she was having trouble with her account. Leo says that gaining control of her computer remotely likely gave him that control and the only thing she can do is backup her data, format her hard drive, and reinstall windows from a known, good source. If one needs help from AOL, contact them directly here - https://help.aol.com/products/new-aol-desktop

Harry is with Verizon and he wants to get a Blackberry 9900 phone for AOL since it doesn't work on his 9930. Leo says it won't work. Verizon was a CDMA based network and the 9900 won't work on that. So it would be a waste of money to do so. Leo says he should just change his email so that he can use just about any other phone.

Pauline is concerned that with Verizon buying AOL, her Yahoo Mail will go away. How can she back it up? Leo says that using POP3 mail is essentially backing up her email to her hard drive because it downloads the email directly to her computer. So it's already backed up.

Bob has Verizon and they recently migrated his email from Yahoo to AOL and they didn't bring over any of the email or the data. And Yahoo won't let him reset his password. Leo says that it's apparently the case that his email had been disabled. The irony is that Verizon may buy Yahoo, and if they do, they'll probably move him back. Bob may also try going directly to Yahoo Mail and logging in that way. He could also try account.yahoo.com and see if he can log in that way.

Bonnie has lost her address book through Verizon. Leo says that's why everyone needs to backup their contacts and why Leo recommends having contacts saved through a Google account. Verizon has moved all users to AOL for email, and it could be that her contacts got lost in the transfer. Leo says that Verizon has to have a backup of the contacts. And since they are doing a pilot program of migrating this over, they are likely to be very receptive with helping her. She might also try logging into mail.yahoo.com with her Verizon account. Then back it up and move it to Google!

Bob has a Microsoft account that he created using an AOL email address. He was checking his email and inadvertently got into an Outlook.com environment. He's wondering if he can back out of that without affecting his One Drive, Skype, and other Microsoft apps associated with that account. Leo says that by default, anyone with a Microsoft account, even if it's tied to another email address, has an Outlook.com account. Leo says he can just ignore that. He doesn't think there's any harm in that.

Eric has been a long time AOL customer. AOL recommended SlimCleaner Plus and he trusted it. Leo says it was an ad that AOL sold and Eric got bit. He tried to remove it and now he's getting popups saying someone is trying to access the account. Leo says that's trying to prevent you to uninstall it and that's bad behavior. Look for an uninstaller. At worse, you can backup your data and reinstall Windows. But ignore the popup and uninstall it anyway. And don't trust ads. Just because they come from AOL doesn't mean it's a good thing to get.

Frank is ready to finally get rid of AOL and wants to know what's a better alternative; especially for email. Leo likes Gmail because he can sync all of his devices thanks to the IMAP email protocol which keeps all email at the server level. Frank can just use the webmail version or he can use an email client like Outlook. Mozilla has one called Thunderbird.

Mike thinks that his AOL account got hacked. Leo says the first thing to do is change his password. But even with that, chances are the account may not have been hacked, but spoofed. Spammers can pick up his email address and can use that in the return box. They swap them out from time to time, and chances are Mike's account email is on a list that spammers buy. The only thing he can do is wait for the spammer to move on to another email address.