Usually an email provider will block links on "untrusted" senders unless you mark it as such, making all links unclickable. This is obviously to prevent spam and harmful content from loading on your machine. There are ways to make links automatically open in an email, so it's an important feature.
See if you can find someplace within aol that you can make AWF a "trusted" sender or allow links in your emails from AWF. There must be something in their software.