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Lycos Finally Discontinues Its Free Email Service (lycos.com)

Posted by EditorDavid on from the 24-years-later dept.

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.

13 of 51 comments (clear)

  1. Who knew by ArchieBunker · · Score: 2

    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
    1. Re:Who knew by deadfwd · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.

      --
      "Sit Back, Relax, and Smell The Popcorn" - www.LateNightPopcorn.com
    2. Re:Who knew by DontBeAMoran · · Score: 2

      2800bps? Surely you meant 2400bps or 28.8kbps?

      --
      #DeleteFacebook
    3. Re:Who knew by 93+Escort+Wagon · · Score: 2

      Metacrawler FTW!

      Was Lycos the one which ran the ads with a dog, where someone would ask something and then you’d hear “Fetch, Lycos!” and the dog would dash off to get the results?

      --
      #DeleteChrome
    4. Re:Who knew by Cederic · · Score: 4, Informative

      Hence Dogpile, which called on all of them and returned combined results.

      Then came Google..

    5. Re:Who knew by Excelcia · · Score: 2

      They were a good search engine before they tried to be an everything portal. People went there for search results, and so they tried to become the place you could go to for everything and not have to search for anything. Slow to load, intrusive, and tacky. Google did it better by keeping their search clean, other things unobtrusive and selectable in a menu, and allowing people who wanted to find something to get in, search, and get out quickly. If Lycos had followed that model, they could easily have retained their crown.

  2. Typo by koavf · · Score: 2

    "It's" should be "its".

    1. Re:Typo by reboot246 · · Score: 2

      That "education" thing is not optional.

  3. Hahahaha I'm safe. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

    I use email at Excite.

    1. Re:Hahahaha I'm safe. by darkain · · Score: 3, Funny

      Would you like the phone number to my BBS?

  4. Already? by Snufu · · Score: 3, Funny

    I just finished migrating all my email from Prodigy to Lycos.

  5. I once interviewed for Lycos by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.

  6. At least they're giving you... by Ambient+Sheep · · Score: 2

    ...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!