AOL has joined Yahoo Messenger in allowing users to send Free SMS using their AOL India Mail and AIM (AOL Instant Messenger) which they had debuted in India last year.

The offer looks good enough since it allows users to send Free SMS directly from AOL mail. This though is not a new phenomenon as Yahoo Messenger has allowed users to send Free SMS through their messenger client to any mobile devices for quite some time now.

The only catch with Yahoo was that the person who you send a SMS too needs to reply atleast once to you or else you cannot send more than 5 SMS messages to them.

With AOL I do not see any such restrictions listed out on the site, but guess they will definitely have some cap on the SMS messages you can send out. Though with SMS messages costing as low as 30 paise (approx 0.001 0.01$) in India for bulk SMS gateways it is not going to raise a huge dent in Time Warners pockets.

The service allows you to send Free SMS to Airtel, Vodafone, Aircel, MTNL and spice networks only.

If you want to start using this free service checkout AOL promos for sending Free SMS or start using the AIM Client for India.