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.

Comments

Re:Who knew

[deadfwd]

Oh the memories. I remember using Excite, AltaVista, Lycos, and Yahoo. You would start at one and search, then pull up the others in different windows and by the time you got back to the first query it was finally finished loading at 2800bps. Those were the days for sure.

I once interviewed for Lycos

[Anonymous Coward]

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.