AOL to Offer Free Custom E-Mail Domains

Following in the footsteps of Microsoft and Google, AOL said Wednesday that it would begin providing a custom e-mail domain services for its customers beginning in September. Like its competitors, AOL My eAddress would be provided at no charge.

The service would include the registration of a .com or .net domain, plus up to 100 personal e-mail accounts on that address. As well as using their personal domain for e-mail, AOL says it would allow customers to use it as their AIM screen name and to access restricted areas of the AOL network.

"AOL is about to make online communications more personal than ever before," AOL Communication Products head Roy Ben-Yoseph said in Wednesday's announcement. "The most popular Internet activity is email, yet many people don't have an online identity that's truly personal and meaningful to them."

Users would have the choice of either accessing their e-mail through the AOL.com Web site, or an e-mail client that supports the IMAP protocol. The service will include anti-virus and junk mail functionality, and give users 2GB of storage.

AOL said it will also integrate My eAddress with other services across the company's network, including Calendar and eventually AOL Pictures.

While no Web hosting functionality is included in the service at this time, AOL eventually plans to allow users to create a Web page on the domain through the AIM Pages social networking service.