OK, so it really has not come to that point yet, but will it? I read last week that Lycos Europe was dropping their free email offering completely. Here is a copy of the letter Lycos sent to their users (as posted here):
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
Is this the beginning of a new trend and the end of free email? I think not. This may be the beginning of a trend to allow the hackers within our organizations provide solutions to these problems (after all that is what they do right?). I’m not talkling about the script kiddie in the coffee shop in the corner of your building trying to deface your web site, I’m talking about the guys in the corner who would rather figure out how something works than rely on what a sales person tells them it does. I see this as a welcome end to the messiness I’ve seen (and had to clean up) of upselling hardware and software to line the pocket rather than giving people what they actually asked for and need.
/endrant…. jb
About Jason Brown
Jason Brown is the acting CTO for Atmail and focal point for Atmail Appliance systems, based out of Polson, Montana. Jason has a wide range of experience in providing hosting solutions for Email services for his own business. In his spare time, Jason promoting "Security Through Awareness" and researching on-line security tools (see http://thumbprintsecurity.com).
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