Extended, or you were never right in the first place? As I said, many people I've worked with have been off their AOL accounts for extended periods, I've never heard of an account deletion in practice.

And of course, the key issue is: You can also call them! Which invalidates any comparison to an unfeeling, unapproachable behemoth like Google, which will not speak to you and will never make exceptions in their policies.

Perusal of online help guides (https://www.lifewire.com/when-aol-mail-account-is-deactivate...) suggests 90 days to deactivation, then 90 days to deletion was a known standard at some point. The Wayback Machine only archives the AOL help link to 2022, so it may be a recent policy change.

Regardless, you're quite correct that AOL has responsive customer service relative to Google. Unfortunately, Jeff is also quite correct that this is a security exploit vector, one AOL is notoriously vulnerable to (https://www.theregister.com/2015/10/19/cia_aol_hack/). So if you're using AOL, you're more likely to be able to recover your email but also more likely to get hacked by some stranger if they decide to target you specifically.

(The moral, sadly, is the digitally impoverished get it coming and going. "Pick your way for the tool to screw you" is the best they get).