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 ...
“I have a friend who still has an AOL address.”
One can still get an AOL account.
30 million have AOL email accounts.
My AOL account is over 30 years old.
Wish I had setup a throw-away account to use for account signups way back when! Probably would have prevented all the junk mail. My wife has a Yahoo account, too, and I cringe every time I see her give yahoo.com another site visit.
1997, that's the year I got my first email address at Yahoo right after the internet first came to our town. Still have it.
I got mine in the mid-90’s too. Still have my yahoo and lycos emails. Until last week.
It’s funny because whatever internet company you paid to get online gave you your own email under their domain as well. I’ve probably had about 8 internet service providers over the past 30 years, and at least that many emails under their service. I have no idea what happened to those mailboxes.
They said it meant spider — but lycos is a wolf spider (lycanthropy) while arachne is the less hairy version.
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.....
For 20+ years, I had a private email address. They stopped supporting it. It’s going on 3 years and I still have trouble getting my new outlook address updated...
It’s a pain in the arse.
I hear you! I've had four different providers the past 29 years and all of those email addresses have now disappeared. My present provider doesn't even offer email which is why I'm glad I still have my Yahoo address.
You might be surprised to learn that those email boxes didn't actually disappear, unless the service provider managing them disappears. Many internet services let you take them with you. I used to have AT&T internet, (@sbcglobal) and still use that email separate from AT&T service.
The mailboxes likely stayed active after you cancelled service.
I still have an active Mindspring account dating back to 1996. It had been languishing for free, but they found a way to make me pay, and then increased the charges. I don’t mind paying as long as I can keep them in business, I guess.
WOW! I had not heard the name Mindspring in over 20 years! I remember an early boss of mine had this email service, and though it sounded cool. It was different because I remember her having it accessible on one of those new-fangled cellular brick phone things. LOL!
Minespring merged with Earthlink.
Back when a 56k modem and you were in business. FR loaded as fast as today because few images were posted. They might have been banned, you could not post them if you wanted to.
Mailcity was one of my first free web email accounts as well. I think Excite Mail moved to Mailcity shortly after they formed.
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