AOL app password: how to create one, step by step (2026)

Trying to add your AOL address to Outlook, Thunderbird, a phone's mail app or an AI assistant, and your password keeps getting rejected? That is by design. AOL blocks your real account password for third-party apps that sign in over IMAP or POP. Anything that is not AOL's own app or website needs an app password: a one-time generated password that only unlocks mail access, and that you can revoke at any time without touching your real password.

How to generate an AOL app password

1. Sign in at login.aol.com/account/security (or aol.com → your name → Account Security).
2. Scroll to App passwords (sometimes shown as “Other ways to sign in” → Generate app password).
3. Click Generate app password and give it a name that tells you later which app holds it — “thunderbird laptop”, “anymailmcp”, “iphone mail”.
4. AOL shows the new password once: a string of lowercase letters, no spaces. Copy it and paste it straight into the password field of the app you are setting up. You cannot look it up again later — if you lose it, delete it and generate a new one.

The settings to pair it with: AOL IMAP and SMTP

The app password replaces your password in any standard mail client. The rest of AOL Mail's settings are the same for everyone:

• Incoming (IMAP): imap.aol.com, port 993, SSL/TLS
• Outgoing (SMTP): smtp.aol.com, port 465, SSL/TLS (port 587 with STARTTLS also works)
• Username: your full address, e.g. you@aol.com
• Password: the app password, exactly as generated

Good to know

• One per app is the right habit. Generate a separate app password for each app instead of reusing one: when you retire an app, delete its password and nothing else breaks.
• Old verizon.net addresses work the same way. Verizon consumer email migrated to AOL infrastructure years ago — sign in to AOL with the verizon.net address, generate the app password there, and use the same imap.aol.com servers.
• att.net is not AOL. AT&T addresses (att.net, sbcglobal.net, bellsouth.net) run on Yahoo infrastructure and use AT&T's own “Secure Mail Key” instead — see our AT&T page.
• Changing your AOL password kills existing app passwords. If mail suddenly fails in every app at once after a password change, generate fresh app passwords — the old ones are dead.

When the sign-in still fails

• Your real password never works in a third-party app — expected, by design. Only an app password works over IMAP.
• The app password is rejected — check for a trailing space from the copy, and type it as one unbroken string. If it was created before your last AOL password change, it no longer works: generate a new one.
• No “App passwords” section — you are signed in to the wrong account, or the account is very old and needs its recovery info (phone/email) confirmed first. Complete the account-security prompts and the section appears.
• Mail app connects but sending fails — the SMTP side is missing authentication. Set smtp.aol.com to use the same username and app password as incoming.

Why we wrote this

We run anymailmcp.com, a bridge that connects mailboxes to AI assistants like Claude and ChatGPT over MCP — and AOL is one of the providers where an app password is the door: AOL offers no OAuth for outside mail tools, so every mail app you have ever used goes through this exact flow. If that is what brought you here, it takes about a minute: generate the app password exactly as above, then connect your AOL mailbox — the IMAP and SMTP settings are filled in automatically, we verify the login live against AOL's servers, and your assistant can read, search and (if you allow it) send from your AOL address. The details live on our AOL provider page.