My understanding is that AOL uses IMAP 4 -- not POP. Although AOL's mail is usually described as "proprietary" IMAP is a standard. Not as widely supported as POP, but still a standard. Our Exchange server at work uses IMAP and I've written a lot of Perl code to access folders and messages. I did all of that with Mail::IMAPClient

Having not tried my IMAP access against any AOL accounts, it may be that AOL uses a version/variant of IMAP that Mail::IMAPClient does not support. I see several other specific IMAP 4 clients out there, such as Mail::Box::IMAP4 but the ones I checked all had "under development" disclaimers.

Here's an old script I wrote to show my IMAP server folders. It may help you see if you can access AOL using Mail::IMAPClient.

use Mail::IMAPClient;
use Getopt::Std;

$mail_server    = 'XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX';  # mail server IP
$delimiter      = "\t";

sub parse_options()
{
    getopts("cd:m:v");

    $mail_server = $opt_m if ($opt_m);
    $delimiter = $opt_d if ($opt_d);

    die "Usage: $0 [-c] [-m mail_server] [-d delimiter] user_name pass
+word\n"
        if (scalar(@ARGV) != 2);

    $user_name = $ARGV[0];
    $password = $ARGV[1];
}

sub show_folders()
{
    local $user_name;
    local $password;
    my $client;
    my @folders;

    parse_options();

    print "Connecting to mail server $mail_server as user '$user_name'
+, " .
          "password '$password'.\n" if ($opt_v);

    $client = Mail::IMAPClient->new(Server   => $mail_server,
                                    User     => "$user_name",
                                    Password => $password) or
        die "Can't open IMAP connection to mail server $mail_server: $
+!\n";

    @folders = $client->folders();

    foreach my $folder (@folders)
    {
        if ($opt_c)
        {
            printf "%s%s%d\n", $folder, $delimiter,
                   $client->message_count($folder);
        }
        else
        {
            print "$folder\n";
        }
    }
}

show_folders();
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