The Lycos Mail (UK) front page currently boasts the following testimonial for its free 300 Mb e-mail accounts: Lycos Free Email is the best designed Free email out there. Period.
Well, not in my experience it isn’t.
Once upon a time I got fed up with the increasingly large amount of spam ending up in my Hotmail account. I was also getting annoyed with the stupidly low 2 Mb mail quota. Lycos Mail boasted a 15 Mb quota and POP3 support as a bonus for when I didn’t need to use Web mail. Fantastic. A couple of months later, support for POP3 stops and a redesign with some funky JavaScript starts throwing Mozilla browsers into a frenzy. Lycos Mail was no longer viable for me, so I went back to my Hotmail spam account.
Of course, now none of this really matters as I host my own e-mail accounts, which I can access via the Web if needed. However, my girlfriend still uses Lycos Mail and I don’t think there’s ever a time I don’t hear cursing when she’s checking her Lycos accounts. Where did it all go wrong, Lycos?
Update, 15.02.2006
- Related article on the Register: Lycos UK cans POP3.
Comment 1
First of all, I would like to make it clear that I do not use Lycos Mail for my own personal email – I have a myriad other accounts, mostly with Hotmail – yeah, not necessarily the best, but BETTER THAN LYCOS!
The Lycos account is for a group of writers that I manage, and I set up the email at the same time as I set up the free webspace on Lycos.
Things Wrong With Lycos:
* You cannot hit backspace and return to the previous page.
* You can no longer report spam, at least through the way I used to (I think they got fed up of my daily sending them several emails about spam)
* If you block an email address, it still reaches you, but goes straight into your junk folder, which is not what block is for!!!!
* In Firefox, when typing an email, I sometimes get this annoying bug where it constantly tries to search for what I’m typing and then writes over something I’ve already written!!!
* I was not allowed to reply to an email the other day – it produced an error whenever I clicked the button.
* I get HUGE amounts of spam, esp dodgy bank scams – far more than in my Hotmail inbox (I never get dodgy bank scams in Hotmail, and in one account I don’t get any spam whatsoever!).
There’s probably more that I cannot remember but that will do for now. I just wanted to clarify exactly what I find wrong with Lycos. Does anyone else reading this use Lycos Mail, or is that a stupid question? ;)
fairyJo! x, 13 April 2005 at 1102