I was working on this at one time back in late 2014. A bunch of people used scripts I made to start downloading all the file areas. Then... AOL removed the files in January 2015. They also removed support for AOL 4.0 or 5.0 and below last April, and that was the version that a very incomplete Python client was claiming to be.

The research I did into archiving AOL helped me find this: http://lizardhq.org/2015/12/05/aol-desktop.html

Hopefully I'll do enough reversing to fix and finish the custom client one day. Newer clients wrap the login and just the login in some form of SSL/TLS. Which I still need to figure out.

Maybe people can help. There's a channel at efnet #aohell and plenty of information on the archiveteam wiki.

That is a very, very good question. I'm not sure if anyone actually knows right now, in many ways it's a wild west I think. Not important enough for people to struggle over with making money but part of our shared heritage, locked away in an AOL vault that is slowly having concrete poured into it.