Using mIRC with AOL

revised May 18, 2000

AOL used to support official servers for all of the Big Four networks, but after years of unabated abuse, these servers are all but gone now. Instead, AOL customers usually have to rely on the kindness of non-AOL servers, and these servers seem to change all the time, making it very difficult for AOL users.

The good news is, as long as you can connect to at least one server on a particular network, you will see the same channels and people as anybody else on that network. For example, if you connect to the EFnet server irc.mindspring.com, you will be able to talk to anybody else on EFnet, no matter what server they use.

We will try to keep a list of servers you can use below, but these change all the time. You therefore need to be resourceful and learn how to find servers on your own. Here are some ideas.

• Ignore the official mIRC server list, and instead find a more complete and recent list of servers and just keep trying different servers for the network.
• If you do manage to connect to the network using one server, you can get the complete list of current servers by using the /links command.
• If you do connect, another useful trick is to see what other AOL’ers are using. Use /who *.aol.com to get a list of some other AOL’ers, then do /whois nickname for some of those nicknames to see what servers they are using, and make a note of the information.

The following are servers that AOL customers can still use, as of the date above.

Undernet irc-i02.irc.aol.com (also known as washington.dc.us.undernet.org)

EFnet irc.freei.net, irc.emory.edu, irc.prison.net, irc.mcs.net

IRCnet irc.gmd.DE, irc.cifnet.com

DALnet AOL users can connect to many different DALnet servers, when in doubt, just use the “random” server irc.dal.net (and try more than once if necessary, each time you roll up a different server).