Today when I attempted to send an aol email, I was stopped dead by a message telling me I had to go to a link and go to a challenge question first. Before doing so, I researched this message and found that aol is sending out this message one time to all users (its been going on for months) to double check that the person sending the mail is not a robot sending spam email. When you go to the url, you have to enter a 7 or 8 digit number shown on the screen. No other questions are asked and after that, you can start sending email again. I changed my password too since I was a bit dubious.