By Daniel Tynan
(10/22/01)

Kiss your ISP good-bye and take your data with you

Tom and Nicole, Julia and Benjamin, you and your Internet service provider: some relationships just aren't meant to last.

When you ditch most ISPs, the breakup is amicable; you simply change the server settings in your e-mail client (Outlook Express, say) and take your contacts and messages with you to your new ISP. But if you're leaving a proprietary system such as America Online, brace yourself for a custody battle over your address book, in-box, and browser favorites.

In this first column, I'll tell you how to move from AOL to a (ahem) grown-up ISP such as EarthLink or AT&T WorldNet without losing all of your stuff. Future editions of Inside @ccess will tackle how to find a local ISP, boost your bandwidth, streamline downloads, wrestle with your service's customer support (or lack thereof), and make your teeth whiter and brighter (OK, I'm lying about the teeth).

The address mess
Before you abandon AOL (if you're not interested in the new 7.0 version), make sure that you can export your address book and contact lists to your new ISP. And don't cancel AOL until you have your new ISP working. There's no easy way to export AOL's Address Book to Outlook Express or Netscape Mail, but I've found a workaround that will do the job.

1.  Log on to AOL and send a message to everyone in your address book with your new contact info. Copy yourself on this message. Log off.

2.  Log on to your new ISP. Launch Outlook Express (which usually comes preinstalled with Windows), open the message you sent to yourself, select the Tools menu from inside that message, then click "Add to Address Book" > "Everyone on To List." Outlook Express will ask you to OK each new address book entry one by one. (Just make sure that none of these names are already in your Outlook Express address book, or the program will stop in the middle of the process.)

For Netscape Mail 6.1, follow the same steps but with one exception: click each address in the To: field and add them to your contacts one by one.

Mail without fail
Want to keep copies of your old AOL mail as well? While you can't import the messages directly into Outlook Express or Netscape, you do have two choices: you can either do it the hard way (open each message and copy the text into your word processor or forward them all to a new e-mail address), or let the $30 ForKeeps ForMorph program create a database of your messages. (Click here to download a free trial version. There's a trick to using ForMorph, though: first, you have to figure out where on your hard drive AOL has placed your mail.

1.  Open your AOL mailbox, select the messages you want to keep, then click "Save to Filing Cabinet" (you'll have to name the new filing cabinet or choose one that you've already created).

2.  Launch ForMorph and select Import > Import Wizard. You'll need to specify the type of file format you're exporting (for example, AOL), a name for your database, and the location of the message file. In my case, my messages were in a file labeled with my AOL screen name in the C:\America Online 6.0\Organize folder. Check or uncheck the box that indicates whether you want to reimport old messages, then click Start. Voilà! You now have an e-mail database that you can sort by date, subject, sender, and more. You can also import these messages into a handful of formats, which include Eudora and dBase but not Outlook Express or Netscape.

Bookmark the spot
Finally, there's an easy way to bring your AOL favorites along with you. Just sign up with Blink, a free Web service that lets you import browser favorites and bookmarks from AOL, Internet Explorer, and Netscape, then view them on its site. (It's also an easy way to share bookmarks between your home and office PCs.) Follow the steps outlined on the site, click a few buttons, and you're done.

There, that wasn't so painful, was it?

Faster, faster
Is your 56K connection dog-slow? Don't blame your ISP; it might just be your MTU setting (that's Maximum Transmission Units, for those of you who aren't propeller heads). The MTU tells your modem how large a data packet to transmit across the Net. By making packets smaller, you can speed up Web surfing as much as 25 percent.

There are plenty of utilities you can use to tweak your MTU. My fave is EasyMTU because, well, it's easy. Launch the utility, click the Suggested settings button, save it, and reboot. Next time you log on, brace yourself for a burst of speed. (Click here to test your connection speed.)

Note: EasyMTU works with Windows 95, 98, and NT; users of other Windows versions can try Tweakmaster, a $20 shareware utility that speeds up all manner of connections, including DSL and cable.

In the future, Dan will answer some of your Internet access questions in his column. If you have any ISP issues, send them our way.

Read the previous Inside @ccess columns 

		Next steps

Freelance writer Daniel Tynan is a frequent contributor to CNET Software. Do you have a better way to leave AOL behind? Tell Dan.