What’s My AOL Mail Login Screen Name?

Lost your America Online (AOL) Mail login or screen name? If you can’t remember your AOL Mail login or screen name, it’s easy to recover them—unless you’ve got an account “deactivation” notification.

But first, let’s start with some definitions.

What an AOL Mail Login or Screen Name Looks Like?

An AOL Mail login, username, and screen name are basically the same thing.

For example, my AOL Mail email address is:

kanoyams@aol.com

My screen name, or AOL username, is all the text just before “aol.com”. For example, my screen name looks like this:

kanoyams

Earlier, AOL users could add up to seven extra usernames to their account. But AOL removed this feature on November 30, 2017. Now you can only have one username.

Now that you have an idea of what a login, email, username, and screen name look like, let’s move onto finding yours.

1. Recover Your Login/Screen Name From AOL

AOL’s official recovery steps for your AOL Mail login or screen name are useless if you haven’t linked a telephone number or alternative email address with your AOL Mail account. If you never used your telephone number or alternative email with AOL Mail, skip this step.

However, if you have registered a phone number or email, it’s easy to recover your login name.

Step One: Go to AOL.com’s Login Page

aol splash screen for logging into an aol mail account

First, navigate to AOL.com and left-click on Login/Join in the upper-right corner of the screen.

Step Two: Go to AOL’s Recovery Page

aol login window forgot username

Second, left-click on the text-link Forgot username? located beneath the blue Next button. The link takes you to the AOL Mail recovery page.

Step Three: Enter Your Phone Number or Email

aol mail account recovery page

On this screen, type in your phone number into the text entry field marked Email address or phone number and click on Continue.

Choose Yes, send me a code in order to receive an eight-digit verification code. Wait up to five minutes for the number to arrive on your cellular device or alternative email. (Landlines are not supported.)

Step Four: Enter Your Recovery Code

aol phone verification page

Type your eight-character verification code into the text-entry field marked Enter 8 characters code and left-click on Verify.

You should now be able to access your AOL Mail account.

This method only works if you’ve provided AOL with your cellular phone number or alternative email. Unfortunately, many of those who want to recover their account will not have the feature set up.

2. Ask Someone You’ve Sent E-Mails To

If you’ve sent someone you know in real life an email from AOL Mail, that person has a record of your email address and therefore your login and screen name. A great example of an email provider that keeps records on its customers is Gmail.

You can recognize a Gmail email address by the name following the @ symbol. For example:

makeuseof@gmail

You can ask anyone you’ve emailed for your AOL Mail address. But I recommend asking someone with a Gmail account.

3. Find Your Login/Screen on Another Site

facebook contact email address

If you’ve never sent anyone an email, you’ll need to find some other way of recovering your login/screen name.

Fortunately, most websites, from retail to social media, keep your email address on file. If you can think of any website where you used your AOL Mail account to register, that’s one place to check.

For example, logging into Facebook makes it easy to recover your email address. If you take the following actions:

Go to Settings & Privacy > Settings
To the right of Contact you should see your email address.

If you see @aol.com at the end of the email address, that means you’ve found your account!

Now (if you’ve found your AOL screen name) you can log into your account with a password. But chances are that if you’ve lost your screen name, you’ve also lost your AOL password.

Recovering Your AOL Password

AOL Mail makes it easy to recover your password, provided you know your login/screen name.

To recover your AOL Mail password, take the following steps:

Go to the AOL Mail website
Left click on Login/Join
Type your AOL Mail email address into Username, email, or mobile and left-click on Next in the blue rectangle
Left click on Forgot Password?
Left click on one of the emails or phone numbers
- If you do not have a recovery email or phone number set up, click on I need more options, located below.

A final possibility is that AOL could also have deleted your account.

AOL Mail Account Deletion

conversation with aol customer support

I reached out to the AOL Mail team for clarification on their account deletion policy. The screen above highlights their response.

Unfortunately, your account is gone for good if it has been deactivated for a period of inactivity lasting 12-months or more. AOL also doesn’t allow users to create a new account with the same email address for security purposes, either. So if you used your AOL Mail account to verify your identity on another website, you will have to contact that site in order to assert ownership.

AOL Deleted My Email Address

deactivated due to inactivity aol login

After recovering your login and password, you may find that AOL has deactivated your account. In other words, they deleted it.

If that’s the case, you would have received the following error message:

“Uh-oh… This Account Has Been Deactivated Due to Inactivity?”

As stated above, AOL’s official policy is to erase accounts that were not logged into within 12 months, destroying all your saved emails. In this case, there isn’t anything that can be done.

In other words: your account cannot be recovered.

While that may sound unreasonable, there’s a good reason: fraudsters and identity thieves may try to steal old email accounts in order to compromise websites you’ve associated with the AOL Mail account. By erasing old emails permanently, AOL patches up a dangerous security hole. The cost, though, is your email account and all its contents.