What would you do if your email account was closed down and all your emails were deleted?
This is the situation that users of the Lycos email service are apparently facing next month after Lycos decided to shut down all unprofitable activities. People need to realise that webmail accounts are only as safe as the companies running them. You don’t get any guarantees with a free service.
Lycos is also closing down the Tripod web hosting service and will be deleting all the data and websites still using the system.
Below is a copy of an email forwarded to us by a Lycos email user:
Dear User,
We regret to inform you that our parent company has decided to discontinue all unprofitable activities.
One of the activities that will be discontinued is our E-mail business division. For this reason, we are hereby terminating your account as of 15 February 2009. Currently, we are still working on finding a solution to provide you the service through another provider. If we should succeed to do so, we will inform you within the next 4 weeks. But as this is currently doubtful, we would like to ask you to assume the end of the service.
Prior to this date, you may continue to log in to your e-mail account and receive and send mail as usual. After this date, however, we will close your account and delete all content and access authorizations stored with Lycos in relation to your e-mail account, in accordance with legal requirements.
You will then no longer be able to receive or send e-mail under your e-mail address. The contents of your mailbox will also no longer be accessible. For this reason, we ask that you back up all important data from your Lycos e-mail account in the next few days and switch to another e-mail provider.
Should you still be entitled to services for any additional paid options, we will of course reimburse the balance to the bank account you provided.
We regret this measure and would like to thank you for the trust you have placed in us.
Kind regards,
Your LYCOS Mail Team
Lycos UK Ltd., 35 Vine Street, London, EC3N 2AA, UK
registered in ENGLAND AND WALES | Registration No. 03923511 | VAT number: 756796467Copyright © 2009 Lycos, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Lycos® is a registered trademark of Lycos, Inc.E-Mail: mail-support-uk@lycos-europe.com | Tel.: 0906 784 4 784 (1£/min.)
http://www.lycos.co.uk
Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Leeds based digital & SEO agency Branded3. Patrick also runs Blogstorm.You can get our blog posts delivered for free by email every day - simply add your email address to the box below or alternatively grab the RSS feed.
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Bit of a nightmare situation, really. I shall have to trawl through thousands of old messages to forward those I need to keep to another account.
Also, there is no forwarding service, for incoming mail. This is hugely problematic as I have used my Lycos account for years, and have sent out hundreds of C.V.s with the account on it. Thus, I often pick up work from companies whose records I’m on, via this account.
I wrote a few articles about free webmails on my website a while ago. A main point in my argument was that free webmails are unreliable, thanks to tactics like Yahoo’s shoddy anti-spam attacks on other mailservers. There’s no telling whether the email will get through such bad behaviour and delivery-receipts are unreliable. I can quite understand why a solicitor won’t send email to the likes of hotmail, even if I think it’s just as probable that the solicitor doesn’t “get†email.
I also noted that if anyone uses free webmail for important work email, they’re foolish and in for a world of pain from things like the abrupt closure described in the article above. That seemed to be very controversial, so I’m almost glad that Lycos have given the biggest demonstration yet that you should keep one eye on the exits if you use free webmail.
I’m a Lycos.es (Spain) user. I opened my lycos mail inbox last week and I haven’t received any mail from lycos…
Now I can’t access to mail.lycos (500 error) and I’ve landed on this page by google searching. I hope I can access to lycos in next days so I can make a copy of my mails.
Thanks, I really didn’t know anything about this situation.
Remember these services are only shutting down with relation to europe users.. and will remain open in the USA. http://crenk.com/lycos-to-not-shut-down-mail-and-tripod-services-in-usa/
no!!!!
say it aint so… blaaaaargh!!!
:’(
CORRECTION – The original TechCrunch article posted by Michael Arrington pertains to products and services offered by Lycos Europe and has absolutley nothing to do with the Lycos Tripod and Lycos Mail business units offered through Lycos operations in the U.S. A completely separate entity from Lycos Europe, Lycos Inc. (www.lycos.com) continues to operate social media, publishing and search services including both Tripod and Lycos Mail. Currently, Tripod is the #17 social networking site worldwide (comScore MM Dec. 2008), with millions of member pages hosted, published and visited each month.
Mr. Arrington has made corrections to the erroneous post. To read Lycos’s response, go to: http://www.buzz.lycos.com/index.blog?entry_id=1874608
– Kathy O’Reilly, Director of Public Relations, Lycos, Inc.
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Hello Kathy. Actually this was the original blog post , TechCrunch got the news from here.
The email above makes it perfectly clear that it came from Lycos UK.
More comments from Patrick AltoftI have just tied to get intoi my Lycos UK email account and have also got a message saying;
500 Servlet Exception
/gfx/lib/menu.xsl
——————————————————————————–
Resin 2.1.17 (built Tue Jul 11 09:01:03 PDT 2006)
I cant acess my lycos email this morning, get …500 Servlet Exception.. message
We’ve got facilities to backup POP accounts and to migrate those to a new account either with us or with an alternative free provider… see
http://www.ifdnrg.com/2.0/web/lycos_backup_service/
Hopefully someone will step in, but if anyone needs a backup in the interim we can help ( for a small fee)
But what do you expect from a free service ? Surely not what you’d get from something you pay for ? Isn’t there a major hurdle for internet users to overcome here, in their expectation that everything will be provided for free (i.e. at someone else’s expense) ?
So sites give you free use of all their content and even forums, and try to claw back a few quid by carrying some adverts; and the response isn’t ‘fair enough, you don’t charge me’; it’s (nose out of joint, spoilt child tantrum) ‘well in that case I’ll use an ad blocker’. The recession we are now in will surely see a lot of free lunches disappear as companies have to compare costs with revenue; and the freeloader will have to get used to a different business model.
The answer may be: to have aUS lycos account (even if you’re in the UK). mail.lycos.com hasn’t been abandoned yet…. but how long until it is?
To Polymath’s point – this wasn’t just a freebie – I paid good money to upgrade my account so that I wouldn’t have ads on outgoing messages. I guess they just didn’t convice enough people to do the same.
Annoying.. i just need time to check thru 3000 emails but they have shut it down before i can do anything… can anyone help me retrieve or open my email…???can i have a day or two stating that we have two days left to cler up or something…
Iam one of your customer user this web mour than 5years
Can you open may E-mail accaunt please for may Bessenec.
Thank you.
I was not informed of any trouble with my lycos account, had no idea they were closing and suddenly it’s gone, no warning nada.
unfortunately i never recieved notice from lycos and my mail just went puffed…
now all my important emails are gone…
My Lycos account was basically my business account. Now when I tried to sign on today I was immediately taken to a page that stated “Please Upgrade your Account” with a $US19.95 price tage without warning and no way to get to my emails unless I pay. Granted if you read the “fine print” that allowed to do whatever they want, they can cut you off whenever and whatever is left on there servers you can’t get to, ostensibly it belongs to them. When Lycos UK was shutting down, they at least gave a certain amount of time for people to clear out their emails or forward them or leave a forwarding email address. Lycos must think they’re going to do more business. In reality they’ll get less now. What advertisers are going to want to advertise when Lycos eliminates millions of customers without notice.
Just tried logging in today and es, the account seems to be closed though there’s a warning in red that may suggest this is temporary. I keep some files in one of my old lycos accounts. Hopefully it is only temporary.
I was not informed that Lycos mail is closing down. I’m using it 8 years already, al of my business and personal contacts were on it, thousands of important e-mails also and I didn’t have any oportunity to copy not one of it.
Can somone PLEASE help me or alow me the access to my account for few days.
Thank you!
My e-mail has been blocked without any notice. I have beeing trying to open the mail with my correct password but the reply shows password not matching and also sometimes it shows username not found. When I have been operating this e-mail for the last many years it is not clear to me as to how the username not found and password not matching.
What’s going on? I checked my mail all thru July and into August. Just trying to check now. HA! the link has been broken. The link! I have been with lycos for the past 7 years or so. Gimme back my lycos.mail
What’s this all about? I haven’t lost my lycos email account which I’ve been using since 2001. Are you sure this is all true? Never heard anything until today when I tripped upon this page.
This may be old news, but having contacted Lycos, I was informed that they are not closing down their e-mail service.
omg!!!!! I never knew about this problem with Lycos!!! Is it true?!? I have been using my lycos email acct up until 06/2010 and everything was fine! This really sucks …. I hope the email link is just down. What's the real scoop. I need my Lycos Mail!!!!!
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