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Lycos Finally Discontinues Its Free Email Service (lycos.com)
Long-time Slashdot reader williamyf writes:
You may think of it as the end of an era, or as the final nail in the coffin. Today Lycos, one of the pioneering web portals of the '90s, notified all it's users that "On May 15th, 2018, we will no longer be offering free Lycos Mail accounts." They have been very upfront about the reason:
"Q: Why are you doing this?
A: Providing mailboxes costs us money, and we no longer make enough from ads to support the cost of the mailboxes."
At it's heyday, Lycos was acquired by Terra Networks (a division of Telefonica), then sold to Daum Communications in Korea and then to Ybrant Digital in India. The search engine and other parts (like Angelfire, Tripod and Gamesville) continue working. In the meantime, instructions are provided to download all your mail via POP3 for offline archiving, or to upgrade to Paid Accounts.
"Q: Why are you doing this?
A: Providing mailboxes costs us money, and we no longer make enough from ads to support the cost of the mailboxes."
At it's heyday, Lycos was acquired by Terra Networks (a division of Telefonica), then sold to Daum Communications in Korea and then to Ybrant Digital in India. The search engine and other parts (like Angelfire, Tripod and Gamesville) continue working. In the meantime, instructions are provided to download all your mail via POP3 for offline archiving, or to upgrade to Paid Accounts.
Lycos was still providing email in 2018? They were a good search engine before AltaVista came along.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
"It's" should be "its".
I use email at Excite.
A: Providing mailboxes costs us money, and we no longer make enough from ads to support the cost of the mailboxes."
Ads, or "you're the product". A lesson the "everything should be free" crowd should take to heart.
Today Lycos, one of the pioneering web portals of the '90s, notified all it's users
I got the email on the 10th of April.
I wonder how many services will be around 50 years from now? 100? Will future generations look at old e-mails like old letters and post cards?
Thought it died long ago.
I haven’t seen a @lycos.com since the ‘90s.
I just finished migrating all my email from Prodigy to Lycos.
They've been around for a long time, since the days when everyone were using hotmail.com, angelfire.com, and lycos.com. I always thought lycos.com sounded much more respectable and serious than the others.
I had 8675309@mailcity or @lycos.com. As of now it is still working but I'm sure it will soon be gone. Oh well.
I once interviewed for Lycos. They were your typical Solaris snobs (if you knew Linux backwards and forwards, that didn't matter one bit because it wasn't the then-very-expensive Solaris). Unpleasant experience. This was when they were still considered a big company (though, looking back, they only had one fairly small building with all of their offices. And this was long before working remotely was common), but this was before Google even existed.
Lycos? Was that the dog I first used as a search engine?
Lycos was the reason I met my best friend.
There was a period around 20 years ago when Lycos' search engine was screwed up and would occasionally return someone else's search results to you, which amused me. That happened while I was searching for "taro root" and there was a blog with an interesting name in the results. I wound up reading it and exchanged emails with the blogger and we became best friends. Over 20 years later, we're still close.
I bet your fun at partys.
I don't remember them providing it. :P
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
...Angelfire is still operating!
Nothing says l33t like handing out that @aol.com address in 2018.
Freedom is merely privilege extended unless enjoyed by one and all.
"Today Lycos, one of the pioneering web portals of the '90s, notified all it's users"
Certainly not by sending them, I dunno, an email. I recently cleaned out my inbox, organizing everything, etc, and there was no email from lycos in there at all.
So if by "telling everyone" they mean "We posted on our website in a place very few people are likely to actually see." then if not for this slashdot article (And mind you not everyone reads slashdot) there's going to be some pissed off people by the middle of next month.
On another note, if Lycos was that concerned about how many free accounts they have eating up space, perhaps they should have been a bit more careful with how they handed them out to people when they bought out a service. I have 3 free email accounts with them, and I never signed up for them even once. (This is due to them eating angelfire, mailcity, and eudoramail - with which I did sign up.)
Also, on yet another note. I certainly hope they don't complain that the advertising doesn't pay for free accounts due to them having large number of accounts that are inactive. Because those abandoned accounts hold no data. If you don't log into a lycos email for 6 months, they delete everything in it. (Happened to two of my accounts twice, as I only really use 1 of them.)
When it goes into this inactive state, it doesn't accept new mail either, including spam.
They could officially delete those inactive accounts that haven't been logged into for a year or so.
I'm pondering if I'll upgrade to a premium account or not, if just for one year just to give me more time to move contacts and the like over to gmail. But if they're this hard up on cash that they can't seem to justify holding a bunch of placeholder empty inactive accounts, maybe I should jump ship entirely asap.
...the option to pay.
When EE in the UK closed down all the old Freeserve accounts last year, some of them (including mine) going back nearly 20 years, there was no such option. I had to move my entire "real world" emails (banking, bills, credit cards, various insurances, tax, local authorities, shopping, etc.) elsewhere, having to notify around 40 different entities of the change as well as moving all my old emails over.
To be honest I had been surprised that the service had remained free for so long, and I'd been expecting the inevitable "we now need to charge you £4.99/month" email for years.
What I didn't expect was closure, given that at one time this was the most popular non-ISP email service in the UK. A complete and utter pain that has ensured I will never use an EE service ever again.
About the only good thing you can say about it is they did give a LOT of notice... around four months or so. But even so... well you can tell I'm still butthurt!
We were given until 5/15 to pay for premium accounts or lose the ability to use our email account. Today, 4/26, my account was locked out due to inactivity unless I paid for the premium account. I check my email several times a day so that's not true. The result is that I have been forced to pay early from 4/26 - 5/15. It more than ticks me off. I was planning on paying for the service for a month after 5/15 while I transitioned to a new email account with FREE email.
I wouldn't mind paying for email if I used it for business or in depth interactions. The premium service is overkill for me. I did notice that I had started receiving lots of spam email for a few months before their announcement of having to pay. I believe Lycos sold our email addresses to these people to make money before the 5/15 deadline. I'm having all my Lycos mail forwarded to my new account and none of these spam messages are following, so I suspect this is true.
In any case, I'm working on changing my email address in all my accounts and once that is done I will quit paying. Unfortunately I have done a lot of genealogy on several sites and won't be able to change my submissions. I just don't have the time.
I kept my account going all these years (since 2002) but it wasnâ(TM)t really used after 2009. I only kept it for nostalgia. The main reason was I stopped using Lycos mail was about 2010 when the android phones started having apps and I opened a google account. In 2010 I started getting interested in online security and noticed lycos log in did not and still does not have the secure https: login