Help! Trying to redeem AAdvantage miles with points.com

[tiapam]

Has anyone purchased gift cards with AAdvantage miles recently? Every time I try to do it, even though I have more than the number of miles required it says:

You do not have the minimum balance or program level required to redeem with this program.

I have never tried doing this so I can't figure out if I am doing something wrong. :( I have tried different retailers, but not all 9 pages of them.
The only thing I can think is that AA maybe only redeems for certain retailers but I see no way to filter by program, etc.

Anyone understand how to do this? I have miles expiring Jan 30. TIA.

[Snow mom]

Maybe it would be worth doing a charitable donation (I think the minimum is 500 miles) just to keep your account from losing the miles. I've never used points.com before but I know the magazine subscriptions that are linked through the airline program take several days to post and in the mean time your miles can be gone. I'd worry about this especially with a third party service like points which I think is even less linked to the FF program.

[tiapam]

Thanks. I could not find the donation section yesterday but this morning I did. I really should have done this earlier, I did not realize things would not post automatically. I just donated some miles but I don't even know if they will post in time. It was only about 9K miles but we might actually fly somewhere this year so I could potentially add to it.