Troubled Internet company Lycos Europe, which is owned by Telefónica, is shutting down its email service and website creation and hosting service Tripod, the company is saying via emails to users that begin with “We regret to inform you that our parent company has decided to discontinue all unprofitable activities.” Both services will be discontinued as of February 15 2009.
Below is the email sent to Lycos mail users. The company says it is working on “finding a solution to provide you the service through another provider,” but don’t hold your breath. After February 15, all data is history. Paid Content has the Tripod news. Blogstorm reported the email news.
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
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Now this makes sense. Let the bad ideas go, focus on making money.
Welcome to web 3.0.
Alex,
That is dead on…. Web 3.0 = Make Money…. Excellent and I will credit you when I write an blog article on it.
Stu
Im calling dibs on the def, blogging about it now.
Stu and Alex, here is a story I wrote on the topic the other day:
http://blog.ago...ebook-combined/
I was in an edgy move when I wrote it b/c I’ve been calling the whole “cool and free” model a doomed one for 3 years now.
Let me know what you think.
Best,
George
Remember these services are only shutting down with relation to europe users.. and will remain open in the USA. http://crenk.co...ervices-in-usa/
Other than gmail and yahoo mail (and hotmail too) I really don’t see the point of existence for other email providers on the internet.
http://www.newgadgetsguru.com
All of those suck just a little bit and in different ways. Someone will come along and fix that, but not Lycos.
hm,
I thought this was only true for the European part of Lycos that is owned by Bertelsmann and Telefonica.
I think you’re right. I actually checked my Lycos account that I have and don’t have any sort of email like above. I read about the closure of the European Lycos a while back though and I do know their mail system is going down.
Unless there’s some sort of new news, I think that needs to be mentioned since there isn’t any sort of word on the US front.
Aren’t they going to close Angelfire as well?
Angelfire is still around? Man, thats such a throwback, i had a couple of website under angelfire back then, all coded in pure html! Those were the days!
BestJobsOnline
http://tinyurl.com/7uj5ay
Michael, as far as I know this refers only to the european division of Lycos and thus affecting only the products in Germany, France, UK, Italy, Spain and the Netherlands.
” it’s nowhere near the top ten mail providers, which each have more than ten million users.”
Does anyone know if there is a list of top 10 mail providers in the USA including the number of users?
I’ve been hunting for this list for years and the only info I could get was Yahoo!’s at 80M.
Sorry let me rephrase…
Top 10 mail providers in the US with the number of users in the US.
When I read the post, I had the same exact question.
A quick googling found this list, but ironically enough, lycos mail was listed at #10.
I’m sorry… Lycos is still around? Is Altavista too? Jeez…
Why keep a service that is loosing money!
why keep a service that is loosing money when there ar other services available
http://ww.cellp...n.se/index.html
Interesting that their free e-mail service served no ads. How then were they planning to make money?
Even Gmail, Yahoo mail and Hotmail make no money. They’re being cross-subsidised by other profitable products.
The end of free is nigh.
Angelfire, Tripod, Geocities, aaahh nostalgia.
The end of an era! I feel old, in internet time
That’s like the last nail on the 90’s stars of the web. I wonder if we will see the same for post dot-com-bubble stars in the next few years.
They’re still out there. I just saw a TV commercial for NetZero the other day.
I can’t believe they are still around. They should have followed Infoseek a long time ago.
More and more unprofitable services will be closed this year, be it Google, Lycos or the others. Ad-supported will not work for many and more consumer paid services have to emerge. The changes will also effect the quality of media companies, who understand that the quality of reporting they have had offline is not sustainable online, if the only revenue source is advertising.
http://kaljundi...-the-beginning/
Hi,
One of the internet giants needs to buy/absorb them up -nominal cost, goodwill or they need to create something like the Smithsonian for Internet services.
If Lycos was bothered, I’m sure they could have passed it onto a specialist to outsource like outblaze, or gmail for domains-like, et al, but if they’re cutting services that aren’t profitable, what about the reason many people would be coming to the Lycos portal in the first place.
Sad for nostalgia’s sake -so many people’s first internet experiences, like being there at the big bang!
Kind regards,
Shakir Razak
P.s.
there seems to be some confusion between the 2 independent Lycos’
nostalgia for me…www.mailcity.com on which my first mail id it was….i dunn remember the id even….stopped using it back in 1999…its been a decacde now…sheeessh. feels a bit sad though one has to move on to profitable ventures only….
As far as i can see this only effects operations in europe and has no effect on operations for example in the usa. Can anybody confirm this? Thanks
“Lycos USA” and “Lycos Europe” are two different companies but with the same branding. Only Lycos Europe is going to close their doors.
Please correct the information above.
You can find more information about Lycos Europe at the german IT-Newspaper Heise.de
“Lycos Europe macht zu”:
http://www.heis.../meldung/119484
“Lycos schließt E-Mail-Konten und Tripod-Homepages”:
http://www.heis.../meldung/121869
Lycos havent done anything regards marketing and advertising to keep competitive. I hvent seen the lycos logo since 1999 until now.
CORRECTION – This 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. We are currently making an effort to reach Mr. Arrington directly, requesting an immediate correction to this posting.
– Kathy O’Reilly, Director of Public Relations, Lycos, Inc.
The market decides what is best
http://www.cell...n.se/index.html
Ah, the memories.
well, about time, now with the new website builders those guys are completly out date, I am using wix.com and compared Lycos really looks like it belongs in the 90’s (hmm, it really is from the 90’s)
Hey Arrington,
What about Telefonica’s other start-ups. I’m pretty sure they are all losing money too. Maybe time to check up on them.
Where is the graceful exit?
So Lycos Europe hits a tough spot and deletes a million email accounts? Don’t they have a responsibility pack those accounts up for migration to another service? Keep mothballed accounts around for a few years? Offer the mothballed accounts to a viable business like Yahoo! or Google for hosting and retrieval?
Archive.org only backs up the public internet. We need a similar service to backup the private internet in the public interest.
http://skypejou...t-eviction.html
Mike, I successfully used freetzi (a free host ad supported) it seems to work. I mean for those of us who had PHP4U (mysql and php).
They (Lycos Europe) did provide instructions on how to download your stuff (database and php).
“They (Lycos Europe) did provide instructions on how to download your stuff (database and php).”
Did they? their email download tool fails to start on every PC I own and they dont respond to emails. I dont call that support…
“
It’s sad to see all those services from the Old world are going one after the other. I used to use Tripod for my experimental websites back is school days.
Btw. My first email id was from USA.net. Alas they went paid after some time and I stopped using it.
Did Lycos ever offer businesses email? Like Yahoo does.
Don’t worry you can migrate your website’s to bodhost.co.uk. They offer fully managed hosting service.
For anyone looking for a quick and easy way to backup their Lycos email accounts (or Jubii, Tripod, Caramail and Multimania) we’ve setup a site to do this, here:
Lycosmailbackup.com
Good luck to all those Lycos users on the move!
Ifdnrg team
http://www.ifdnrg.com
My USA Lycos e-mail account is suddenly
inaccessable and the company won’t respond
in any way. What gives ????
I have the same problem. Is there any way to know which country might be servicing my account? xxxxx@lycos.com, is that potentially a European address or strictly U.S.? Thing is, I learned of this just now, with pictures and you-name-its that have apparently now gone by the electronic rubbish bin.
As a non-paying, long-time leech customer, I apparently was not entitled to any sort of warning whatsoever. I will miss the pictures the most.
Someone had once commented years ago that Lycos was “Donkey shit.” Just the other day I was realizing that Lycos seemed to have gotten past all that. Now this.
I’ll miss the pictures the most.
Lycos was and is a Donkey shit
i just open my mails,after getting into the site,its been hanging for almost 12hrs.Lycos shud have indicated earlier if its going to shut down!
My other half has just tried to access Facebook today (03/04/09) and as it uses his Lycos email as a login he now can’t get in. He didn’t have any email about closure and reckons he’s been accessing his email fairly regularly up until now. Facebook also doesn’t provide any way to change your login email if it suddenly becomes disabled. Any ideas guys?
I still believe Carrie Prejean should have won the Miss USA 2009, and not Kirsten Dalton.
Carrie was looking stunning in her swimsuit http://www.yout...h?v=GI3N5CrIusE
I still believe Carrie Prejean should have won the Miss USA 2009, and not Kirsten Dalton.
Carrie was looking stunning in her swimsuit http://www.yout...h?v=GI3N5CrIusE
As for USA – based Lycos.com free email… Without notice it seems to have suddenly switched over to paid subscription. Leaving users suddenly no way to access their inbox unless they cough up $19.95.
Lame way to make money guys! You aren’t gonna win any fans with this strategy.
Thanks for this post.. I’ve actually been investigating this for the last 15 minutes. My sister was using lycos (and being lazy to change providers) and now she can’t get in without paying an upgrade subscription fee. Apparently, this happened today..?
yeah, JERKS!
This is rubbish. I have had my Lycosmail account for about 10 years since they began and now without warning they are asking me to pay. This is blackmail
Well, apparently it was a ’software bug’…
They sent me this reply
––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
The Lycos Mail team investigated the issue that you experienced. The problem was caused by a software bug; you should not have needed to upgrade your membership to continue to access your Lycos mailbox. We truly do apologize for this experience and are working on making sure that this does not happen again moving forward.
If you have any further questions or concerns, please let us know.
Brad
Customer Service
Lycos Services.
––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Well…
Gosh.
Some bug!
At least my inbox is mine again.
I like very much the writings and pictures and explanations in your adress so I look forward to see your next writings.
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