What If? The Future of AOL Mail Under Bending Spoons

Last October, Yahoo sold AOL to the Italian company Bending Spoons for approximately $1.5 billion (as reported by Forbes and others). If you're asking yourself, "What is Bending Spoons?" you aren't alone. They are a tech company known for acquiring well-known digital products and platforms (like Evernote and Meetup) and aggressively restructuring them for efficiency.

But for those of us in the land of email and deliverability, the biggest question on our minds is: What will become of AOL Mail? Let’s play a game of "what if" and look at four possible directions the new owners could take with iconic aol.com inboxes.

1. Nothing! (The Yahoo Backend Remains)

This is perhaps the most logical and least disruptive path. Bending Spoons might own the AOL brand, but they don't necessarily have to run the email servers. Yahoo already acts as the backend infrastructure for several major mailbox providers, including Frontier and AT&T. Comcast has been actively transitioning their user inboxes to Yahoo Mail's backend infrastructure as well. If Bending Spoons doesn't want to build email hosting infrastructure from scratch, they could simply let Yahoo continue to host it. This allows the new owners to focus entirely on building up the AOL brand and scaling its content.

2. The Nuclear Option (Shutting down AOL Mail)

Could Bending Spoons decide they simply don’t want to be in the mailbox business? Running a massive webmail platform is expensive and complex. It’s a non-stop battle against spam and security threats. If they pull the plug, a lot of long-time email users would suddenly find themselves "inbox homeless." Given how valuable a massive, active email user base is for ad revenue and user engagement, a total shutdown seems unlikely to me. But who knows? I’m not privy to their thought processes or intent.

3. Build a Brand New Webmail Platform

Bending Spoons could decide to completely sever ties with Yahoo and migrate AOL Mail to a whole new system, building and setting up their own proprietary webmail system. This would give them total control over the data, user experience, and monetization. However, it represents a massive investment in time, engineering, and physical infrastructure. Migrating millions of legacy inboxes sounds like an awful lot of pain for a questionable amount of reward.

4. Outsource to a Different Third-Party Backend

If they want to get out of the Yahoo ecosystem but have no desire to build their own email infrastructure, they could choose yet another path: AOL Mail to a different white-label email platform. Other enterprise-grade platforms do exist (such as ATMail) that specialize in managing backend email infrastructure for ISPs and brands. It would allow Bending Spoons to keep the AOL Mail brand alive while offloading the server management to a new partner.

My take?

Time will tell which direction Bending Spoons decides to go. Major email migrations are notoriously slow, painful, and risky, so sudden changes are rare. I suspect that if you've got an active AOL email account today, your inbox will be safe and accessible tomorrow. In fact, it might even still be hosted on the exact same Yahoo infrastructure it uses today for a long time to come.

We shall see.