AOL to improve Web mail service

America Online  is getting ready to upgrade the interface and performance of the Web mail service for its subscribers.

The upgrade, possibly by the end of this week, will be followed in several months with the rollout of a free Web mail service for people who aren’t subscribers of AOL’s fee-based service.

AOL expects to switch over to the improved service by Friday of this week, although it could be a day or two later, said Roy Ben-Yoseph, the company’s director of e-mail products, on Tuesday.

“The major thing and the one we’re most proud of is the complete redesign of the interface,” Ben-Yoseph said.

The Web mail interface has been revamped to have the look and feel of a typical Web application, he said. Currently, AOL’s Web mail interface resembles the e-mail interface of AOL’s client application.

Another interface improvement is the display of folders in a pane next to the inbox. Currently, users have to click around a couple of times to bring up the folders, which aren’t displayed next to the inbox.

Along the way, AOL improved the Web mail service’s performance so that it loads and responds faster, Ben-Yoseph said.

Other enhancements and new features include the ability to drag and drop e-mail messages into folders. Also, all the spam-blocking and filtering capabilities of the AOL service will now be available for Web mail users, who currently only have access to a subset of those capabilities, Ben-Yoseph said.

A few months down the road, AOL plans to launch a free Web mail service for nonsubscribers, Ben-Yoseph said. “We’re working on (developing) the exact interface and feature set that will be provided,” he said. “It will be in a few months.”

By enhancing the subscribers’ Web mail service with advanced features and capabilities, AOL is trying to discourage them from migrating to free services from competitors such as Yahoo  and Microsoft’s MSN , said Patrick Mahoney, a Yankee Group analyst.

This is part of AOL’s overall effort to stop the continued erosion in its subscriber ranks, as members ditch the AOL fee-based service, which offers dial-up Internet access along with content and services, and sign up for broadband service, which AOL doesn’t offer, he said. AOL offers a fee-based option that includes content and services but not Internet access to members that have broadband service.

At the same time, AOL is preparing the free Web mail service as a vehicle towards online advertising, where AOL’s larger strategy is to beef up its free AOL.com portal to attract as much Web traffic as possible and consequently advertisers, Mahoney said.

“AOL is going down two paths. It wants to maintain the current subscribers they have and hopefully grow that base with value-added enhancements, unique content and rich applications (that will appeal to broadband users), but it also wants to harness the online ad market and to do that it needs an open (free) portal to attract the mass Web market,” Mahoney said.