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August 2, 2006

New Lycos email tops Gmail in storage, attachment size

Marshall Kirkpatrick

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Lycos announced today that their beta email service now offers 3 GB of storage and allow attachments of “essentially unlimited” size to be sent and received. Gmail is currently topping out at 2.75 gigs of storage, Hotmail at 250 MB and both limit attachments to 10 MB. For $20 per year, Lycos will up the limit to 5 GB of storage.

To prevent infrequent use just for sending huge files, there’s a stipulation that Lycos mail accounts that go unused for 30 days will be deleted, but for $6 per year that limit is removed. Upping the storage and attachment size limits will probably be of interest primarily to people working with multimedia files, for which there are plenty of other options online to store and send such files, but adding this functionality to an everyday email account is a good move.

Whether Lycos can offer search and spam filtering as good as Gmail’s remains to be seen. It also stands at a disadvantage via Gmail’s integration with the rest of Google’s offerings. Gmail’s tabbed conversations and ability to view a wide variety of file types as HTML are also features Lycos mail lacks. Links clicked in emails at Lycos can be viewed inline, without leaving your email interface - that’s nice. One way or the other, the email wars continue. Thanks to Gary Price for pointing this out.

  • Sphere It

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 2nd, 2006 at 10:45 am and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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Comments

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  1. Nimit Maru

    August 2nd, 2006 at 10:59 am

    It is very irresponsible of them to release something untested in Firefox, not to mention kind of sad.

  2. Marshall Kirkpatrick

    August 2nd, 2006 at 11:04 am

    Not sure what you mean. Works fine for me in FF and haven’t read any other mention of this as an issue.

  3. Nimit Maru

    August 2nd, 2006 at 11:08 am

    Sorry I jumped the gun! Some css issues on my own browser.

  4. tom

    August 2nd, 2006 at 11:37 am

    Looks awesome. Bye bye Gmail.

  5. Ryan Williams

    August 2nd, 2006 at 12:06 pm

    Be interesting of course to see if Google retaliates with its own raises. I recall them doing the leap to 2gb+ roughly once Microsoft started offering comparable space to the original GMail (1gb?).

    Competition in a market is always good for the users. :D

  6. Jafar

    August 2nd, 2006 at 12:14 pm

    oh come on, you’re going to switch because someone else offers you more space? How much do you _need_?
    besides. Google’s search is great.

  7. Javed

    August 2nd, 2006 at 12:38 pm

    Gmail isnt just about the storage. it’s got a whole bunch of stuff that Lycos or any other player can’t beat. So even if someone is offering 10 GB for free, it’s noting but a long shot.

  8. Brooklyn

    August 2nd, 2006 at 12:43 pm

    Only one thing to say about this…………FLOP! This does not even warrant the kudos of “nice try.”

  9. Mike Xaviar

    August 2nd, 2006 at 12:44 pm

    There are so many email providers out there and 99.9% of the people never need more that a 1G or so tops, so even if you offered an email with unlimited storage, I don’t think hardly anyone will switch. It’s nice though to able to create a bunch of junk emails with these sites when registering for various beta launches being profiled on techcrunch.

  10. Marshall Kirkpatrick

    August 2nd, 2006 at 12:46 pm

    Mike, that’s what Mailinator.com is for.

  11. T

    August 2nd, 2006 at 12:49 pm

    Its looks great. Im going to test it out.

  12. KJH

    August 2nd, 2006 at 2:28 pm

    Considering that my Gmail account’s storage is currently up to 2750MB, 3GB is hardly an incentive. What’s more is that the Lycos interface pales in comparison to Gmail’s AJAX interface that works more like a computer application than a Web application. While some may say that copying is a weak way to approach your business, Lycos would have done well to imitate Google with their webmail app. After all, sometimes having the best product is the reason why some market leaders are in fact the leaders. This is more of a prototype, rather than a beta launch - I think Lycos needs to go back to the drawing board.

  13. Ryan Williams

    August 2nd, 2006 at 2:37 pm

    Nah, to hell with Mailnator. A Gmail account is great for fighting spam. :)

    Just sign up for everything with it, and if you should happen to [i]want[/i] mail from a certain place to get through, simply set up a filter that redirects all mail containing a certain word to your proper email address. Only takes two seconds and is pretty much 100% free of spam (that actually bothers you).

  14. Josh

    August 2nd, 2006 at 3:52 pm

    “spam filtering as good as Gmail’s” …

    I had to laugh when I read that. I’ve never experienced anything about GMail’s spam filtering to warrant using the the word “good” to describe it. I find Yahoo’s spam filtering to be far, far, far superior when it comes to the free email providers.

  15. SEARCH Engine WEB ♣

    August 2nd, 2006 at 4:14 pm

    Interestingly enough - if you have a tripod homepage account - NO MATTER HOW OLD , even from the mid 90s - all you have to do is sign in and and select the email option ….

    It has a nice clean layout and loads fast - surprised it took lycos so long to do this.

    The unlimited attachments is what will set if apart from most free email services

  16. Alex

    August 2nd, 2006 at 4:15 pm

    I don’t think I have ever received any spam using GMail so how it can get better than that, I don’t know.

  17. L

    August 2nd, 2006 at 4:50 pm

    Hotmail at 2.5 gigs? Not so. This is the text from http://www.hotmail.com

    *250MB inbox available only in the 50 United States, District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico. Eligible Hotmail users will first receive 25MB at sign-up. Please allow at least 30 days for activation of your 250MB storage to verify your e-mail account and help prevent abuse. Microsoft Corporation reserves the right to provide 250MB inbox to free Hotmail accounts at its discretion.

  18. Ebrahim

    August 2nd, 2006 at 5:18 pm

    Email isn’t about storage anymore. ;)

    I like the clean Lycos interface, but I still prefer Gmail and Windows Live Mail.

  19. Zergrinch

    August 2nd, 2006 at 5:30 pm

    If you sign up for the Windows Live Mail beta, your storage is upped to 2 Gigs.

  20. Marshall Kirkpatrick

    August 2nd, 2006 at 5:31 pm

    Good catch on Hotmail. Change made, thanks.

  21. Matthew

    August 2nd, 2006 at 6:35 pm

    This is a joke, right?

    I’ll try any new web app that comes along, so I jumped at this. It sucks. How much does it suck? Gigantic colorful banner ads. Stupid “spam me” boxes during signup that kept getting automatically rechecked.

    No way to archive messages. No *search*. What are you going to do with your 3 gigs of mail? Comb through it by hand? Other interface clunkiness. I want to meet the guy who is going to switch to this turkey. I have some stuff to sell him.

  22. yits

    August 2nd, 2006 at 7:41 pm

    Somehow my Yahoo! Mail (free) is 3.5GB, it just appeared one day as 3.5GB. It used to be 1GB. Not sure about attachment size limits etc.

  23. Wes

    August 2nd, 2006 at 7:55 pm

    If you have to use the account every thirty days to avoid deletion means I will stick to my hotmail for now. I wouldn’t go for third days though but I just wouldn’t take that risk with this new Lycos offer.

  24. Peter

    August 2nd, 2006 at 8:12 pm

    This is exactly the kind of topic I was looking for. Does anyone know of a general-purpose storage space provider that allows different protocols to access the drive? Like, REST/GET/PUT-type stuff, maybe FTP, maybe WebDAV? I’m not necessarily interested in these providers with the upload tools and all that b/c I want to build my own services on top of something generic.

    If there was a provider out there saying, “Here’s some web space for $5/mo and you can access our generic web services to add/update/remove data to/from your storage space” - then that’s what I’m looking for.

    Comprende, anyone? I’m still new to CA - still workin on the Spanglish.

  25. Ashish Sinha

    August 2nd, 2006 at 8:28 pm

    More space means more spams..
    Lycos, incidentally was my first love (i.e. email id) , but thanks to their no-spam-filtering technology, now I just select all and delete all messages.
    Instead of giving away too many *me-too*, “feel-good” goodies, I expect them to really work on their spam filtering technology.

    Sinha
    Idea Labs

  26. Skeptic

    August 2nd, 2006 at 9:30 pm

    Lycos? What is this, 1997?

  27. Tony

    August 2nd, 2006 at 9:33 pm

    Yawn. I’ll keep my gmail.

    Gmail’s conversation alone is gold.
    Don’t know why no one else is doing it.

  28. Tony

    August 2nd, 2006 at 9:35 pm

    Peter: Amazon’s S3, strongspace.com

  29. Peter

    August 2nd, 2006 at 11:04 pm

    Tony: Wow - that Amazon S3 stuff is exactly what I’m looking for. Holy cow. So now I just need to find their competitors (OmniDrive, etc. - I just needed one to find the others) to make sure I’m making the right tech decision. Just thinking things through at the moment. Heard about this GDrive stuff, too. To wait for MS/G to drop their products or not, *that* is the question that afflicts many a developer these days, I’m sure.

    Danke!

  30. LostInBrittany

    August 3rd, 2006 at 12:05 am

    My Gmail account has currently 2750 MB, so the 3GB is nothing to brag too much about. Besides it has gtalk wonderfully integrated, so I fail to see any real incentive to change.

    [sarcasm]And, come on, Lycos is too 90’s, they are completly demodé[/sarcarm]

  31. Elliot

    August 3rd, 2006 at 12:54 am

    Inbox.com gives you up to 5Gb for free and the interface is modern-works prefectly, Lycos charges for 5Gb? again, inbox.com, free, sounds good to me.

  32. Robbie Liu

    August 3rd, 2006 at 4:10 am

    Switching Primary email can be a pain
    so stick to Gmail…

    BTW
    it’s nice when needing to send large attachments

  33. Douglas

    September 6th, 2006 at 7:42 am

    The seller here is definitely the unlimited attachment size. There are a number of providers out there charging for this service alone, so clearly there’s a market for it.

    For example, I’m taking a class right now that requires me to scan large amounts of material and forward it to my classmates. File sizes can range from 3 to 30MB. Rather than splitting up the files into the lowest-common-limit, or trying to host them on a web page, I’m going to recommend that they all get a Lycos account. They’ll check it as often as necessary during the course, and once it’s over, they needn’t care any more, thus circumventing the 30 day rule.

    Better yet, I can create a single account we can all share, name it after the class, and once the class is done, we won’t care if it gets cancelled.

    I’ve got to agree about the interface, though. I’m browsing in FF with external pics not loading. Strangley, the banners come thru just fine, but Lycos’s own icons (envelopes, trash, etc.) are replaced with text links. Yahoo is particularly bad about this. Gmail is no problem at all. For now, I stick with Gmail.

  34. sci-fi

    September 13th, 2006 at 6:27 am

    If you want Email Storage? Try http://www.30gigs.com 30giga bytes of email storage for free!!!! enjoy!!!

  35. sci-fi

    September 13th, 2006 at 6:50 am

    still not satisfied? try a 1 tera byte of free email http://www.mailnation.net/ wew!

  36. blog

    October 20th, 2006 at 9:08 am

    my news blog http://1what.com

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