Since its launch, About.me has been gaining a good bit of traction for being someone’s personal resume/cv/about page, and for good reason – they offer an easy integration with various social tools and great design. Offering an email address of your About.me username (mostly people’s full names) @aboutme.com sounded like a great idea – a good looking personal email address to go along with your great looking online personal profile.
However, I was a little concerned to find that the email was powered by that internet dinosaur AOL (about.me’s parent company). Now to give both About.me and AOL credit, the interface is extremely clean – when you click on a message to read it opens in full-screen preview, with just a skyscraper ad down the right hand side, and the compose message screen is also full-screen, but this time advertising-free. The service also gives you free POP3 and IMAP access which means you can connect the account to pretty much any email client (or even your GMail or Yahoo Mail account).
But whatever you do don’t hit the View All Mail link as that takes you straight to default AOL Mail, which is pretty much everything you don’t want from your email – lots of ads and graphics and flashy elements.
Basically – About.me are offering a great looking personal email address, but make sure you just feed it through another account to keep clear of AOL if you want to make use of it.