strong words. strong opinion. i respect that. but it's all about choice though. aol's email client is pretty bad, but it sounds like it has been working for him all this time, and it's not like unix clients, or earthlink's (probably eudora), etc. don't fail to blow up at times as well. the problem is that aol's mail file format seems to be undecipherable, which is the point, i guess, from AOLs point of view. problem is importing it, and or fixing a corrupted mail file. imap folders and mail spool files are simple flat files - even mbox, and other mail formats, but i'm betting the random ascii characters in the email file is either the corruption, or the key to what makes AOLs mail file format proprietary. --alan