With AOL's move to being a content provider, and slowly but surely dropping the already-abysmal support of the AOL 'client' software for Macs in favor of a few simple stand-alone apps like the Connect dialer, AOL Radio, and AOL Pictures, I was concerned about how to access my member 'webspace' or 'filespace'.
Previously, the webspace/filespace could be accessed via FTP, but only if you were logged in via the AOL client for authentication into their system. Third-party FTP programs used a backwards-type of authentication, where one's AOL username was left generic (such as "anon"), and the password given was your full AOL email address. AOL then checked to see if you were logged in via their client software (on the same computer) and if so, would grant FTP read/write permissions to your file space.
AOL tech support said that was still the only means of authenticating to the member webspace for direct FTP, so I assumed that FTP had become another internet dinosaur protocol that they would no longer be supporting.
By accident while trying a new FTP client that supported SFTP, I clicked my old AOL FTP bookmark. Rather than the typical "directory not found" error message, I got a new one saying that the password didn't match the user name -- it had tried to authenticate, even though the AOL client wasn't launched. So in the SFTP connection fields, I just replaced the old "backward" username and password style with my regular AOL username and password. I accepted the Host Key fingerprint and had full, authenticated SFTP read/write access to my AOL file space, without even having the AOL client software running.
Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20060608124220897