In this economy, we all know about retail stores shutting down. But, what about those unprofitable free email services? How safe is your personal email address? Will you be able to use it next month?
Well, I have now seen the first shutdown of an entire branded email service -- without the shutdown or sale of the company.
If you have Lycos Europe email, it is reported that your email address and all the email sitting on the email server will be gone. Lycos Europe is also reportedly shutting down the Tripod web hosting service and will be deleting all the data and websites still using the system.
Here is a copy of a message sent to Lycos users and reprinted in Blogstorm:
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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