Posted on 06/02/2026 12:17:03 PM PDT by fwdude
For nearly thirty years, Lycos occupied a strange corner of internet history. It started as a search engine project in the early web era and grew into a portal packed with hosting services, personal websites, and email. Lycos launched its email service in October 1997, at a time when having an email address still felt novel rather than mandatory. At the olden times of 1997, they had partnered with USA.NET (NetAddress) to offer a co-branded free email service to its portal users, before ditching it in favor of their newly acquired proprietary platform (MailCity) in 1998.For many users, an @lycos.com address became their first online identity, one that survived the dial-up years, broadband adoption, smartphones, and even the rise of the AI era.
Now that chapter appears to be ending. While services do shut down all the time, the problem is how it happened, that is almost no communication, confusion, and a migration process that seems quite confounding at best.
(Excerpt) Read more at triopolitan.com ...
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I have been migrating important contacts away from it for over a year, but it sucks that I can't access it anymore. This was a complete, sudden exit. RIP, Lycos.
I had free accounts there until about 10 years ago when they forced me to close them. I think I had the option to pay and keep them, but I’m cheap and would not consider paying. They gave me about a month to close out and save what I wanted.
I used Lycos Mail for quite some time. I liked it. Then maybe 10 years ago they decided to go over to a subscription-based service only.
I thought that was an odd move, given how many free services were out there.
Anyway, that’s when I left Lycos.
You may not be able to use it but you can migrate.
My first was with “prodigy”...
Yeah, I remember the ending of free accounts. I had such an email history that I decided to foot the $9.95/year bill for the paid account.
I really, really liked the user interface of Lycos mail.
I guess is was just me and the other guy. (we still kept in touch from time to time.) :)
Not exactly a “migration,” if you read the article.
“Not exactly a “migration,” if you read the article.”
I read the article. It says you can migrate your emails from lycos.
You can recover your email, but it won’t be a working email box.
“What Exact Hosting appears to be offering is a mailbox recovery service rather than a mailbox continuation service.”
“You can recover your email, but it won’t be a working email box.”
That is what I said. You won’t be able to use it as a working email platform.
You migrate your lycos emails to an existing email platform.
I just emailed my Lycos account and didn’t get a returned mail response. Don’t know where it went.
“What Exact Hosting appears to be offering is a mailbox recovery service rather than a mailbox continuation service.”
You don’t have to use it if it bothers you so much ...
My problem is that so many people had my lycos email as their contact that I’d like to know if someone is trying to reach me with important information. There was 30 years of contacts out there that have that email for me. I couldn’t even begin to guess who or how many.
If emails to that address aren’t being bounced back, that’s a problem.
Thankfully, I had Lycos set up on the mail app on my iphone, so it has them all captured until last Wednesday, when I got my last email.
I had no idea Lycos was still around.
Mine was @hotmail and still have it, although it has become impossible to fight the tsunami of junk mail coming in.
Most people don't. Do you know that AOL is still around as an email platform and search engine?
We just paid $50 for three years for my wife’s e-mail.
There were warnings (outages). But this stinks.
Mrs. R17 has hotmail.
I have yahoo, (and a throw-away account on gmail).
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