Get your contacts out of AOL the easy way.

If you've been an internet user for a long time, you will probably remember a period in the mid nineties when every delivery of mail contained a few bills, maybe a letter; and around 26 small cardboard enveloped containing AOL set up CD-ROMS. Thankfully it seems that the shiny plague has past, but the legacy of 10 years of intensive marketing is that a lot of internet users started out using AOL services.

While AOL can, and has, served as an easy and safe introduction to the web and e-mail, most users eventually graduate to other more flexible (and open) providers for their mail. Now, AOL doesn't like t loose it's hard won customers without a fight, so they work hard to improve their service, offer features that help users and generally make AOL on line such a great place to be that only an idiot would want to leave, oh wait, no, actually what they do is make it so hard to move your data away from them that grown men have been known to break down in tears. I mean how hard can getting your e-mail contacts, that's YOUR email contacts out of an AOL address book. Well, funnily enough, almost impossible is the short answer. Well it's a business model.

Anyway, our windows cousins have a couple of options in the form of applications that will collect your AOL data for you, but short of running windows on your Intel Mac, OS X users are out in the cold here.

Luckly, there is a sneaky beaky way of getting at least some your data out of AOL and into a more usable form, and here's what you do.

Your first port of call is social networking site Plaxo. You will need to set up a free Plaxo account. Who knows you might even like it there. Once set up, Plaxo offers the insanely useful option of importing your AOL contact list. This is a good thing. 30 seconds later, all your AOL contacts will be safely Plaxo'd.

Plaxo, being a good web 2.0 citizen is all about sharing, and they DO offer the option to export contacts. In the almost universally accepted csv format. (Catch up Apple). In the contacts section is something Plaxo call sync points. Here you can sync data with all common mail apps such as gmail, yahoo mail and apple mail (via address book). You can also do a simple export into a csv file.

And that's it really. 1) set up Plaxo account. 2) Import data. 3) sync to Apple address book, or wherever.

Really AOL, it's not that hard. You can't keep customers by chaining them to an account. Personally I can't see any reason why a Mac user would want to use AOL apart from the fear of loosing years and years of contacts. And now you don't have to worry about that.