iPad provides very good support to all IMAP email services, like Gmail, MS Exchange, Yahoo Mail, AOL mail, Outlook and many others. We have showed you the automatic way to add AOL email account to iPad before in an early article. In this iPad mail setup guide, we will discuss how you can manually setup AOL mail account on iPad Air, iPad mini and other iPad models.
Setup AOL Mail Account to iPad Manually
1. Tap the “Mail” app on your iPad’s home screen, once the Mail app opens, find and tap “Mail, Contacts, Calendars” in the sidebar and tap “Add Account.”
If you are on the latest iOS 11, Go to Settings > Accounts & Passwords and tap Add Account. You can refer to this tutorial to add AOL mail to iPhone.
From here you can see AOL is already an option, if you choose it you will enter the automatic set up mode.
2. Let’s tap Other from above screen to enter the manual setup process. You will then get an screen as below.
3. Tap on Add Mail Account to get started with your AOL mail setup on iPad air. Now fill up your AOL account login or email address, password and other info required. Make sure to enter the full email address, such as iosappweekly@aol.com other than just iosappweekly in the Email box. Once you are done, tap Next.
4. Now you have the option to choose either IMAP or POP on your iPad air. Your AOL mail server support both of them. So you can choose between the two. iPad Air will automatically choose IMAP as the default AOL mail protocol. And we do recommend you to configure AOL Mail via IMAP on iPad Air. It is because every action you take with your AOL email on your iPad air will be copied on the IMAP server. IMAP is ideal for email management on multiple devices, it can keep your AOL emails synced very well. For example, if you organize your email into folders, you can access your AOL email from elsewhere and see the same folders you set up on your iPad air.
5. Enter your incoming and outgoing mail server info.This is the most technical part of the whole process with your AOL account configuration on iPad Air. Luckily there is not much you need to change, you can simply copy and paste below info into corresponding fields on your iPad air.
Use “imap.aol.com” as the Incoming Mail Server hostname, “smtp.aol.com” as the Outgoing Mail Server hostname, make sure to input full email address into both “Incoming Mail Server” and “Outgoing Mail Server” username fields.
6. Tap on Next button, AOL mail server will verify your login, password and other settings. If nothing was input wrong, your AOL account will be setup on iPad air successfully.
Update Jan 2018: this article was originally published in 2014. For those who are using iOS 11 or later, please refer to the linked guide to setup AOL mail on iPhone instead.
I have the same problem. I have gone through this process over and over again. Still says “incorrect username or password for imap.aol.com. I am positive the email and password are correct, as I logged in on my Mac without a problem.
Remove aol from iPad (in my case). Restart iPad. Download free version of the Spark Mail app. Follow their simple directions to add your aol account. Problem solved. (And none of the other procedures online worked for me.)