A friend of mine is also a small business owner and had been an AOL member for 14 years. He used his account for about a thousand sales-related emails per day. One of his invoices to a customer who paid, letting that person know that the item was being shipped, prompted that customer to file a complaint with AOL about this account being a spammer.
Obviously someone at AOL over-reacted, because they shut down his account without even asking him what happened or why. That's right, a non-AOL person caused a loyal AOL customer to be shut down without proof or reason or any sort of double-check to the process. And then, when he tried to deal with the situation and explain what was going on, he got stonewalled and stalled and blocked at every turn. I was there in the store when some of this was going on, and it truly was insane.
I never would have used AOL anyway, and I got my mom weeded off of it years ago, and in fact I sold my shares in their stock the day I quit CNN...but this latest incident is just a further reminder for me about how much AOL sucks.