Lycos Revamps Free Webmail Service Juan Carlos Perez, IDG News Service Wed Aug 2, 9:00 AM ET
http://news.yahoo.com/s/pcworld/20060802/tc_pcworld/126619 Lycos is revamping its free Webmail service, vastly increasing storage space and lifting the size limit on file attachments, the Waltham, Massachusetts, online services provider plans to announce today. Lycos Mail will now offer its subscribers 3GB of storage, up from just 5MB, and will allow them to send file attachments of any size, said Brian Kalinowski, Lycos' chief operating officer. With these improvements, Lycos wants to meet increasing demands for exchanging large media files--like photos, video clips, and songs--via e-mail, he said. Webmail is a key offering for portals like Lycos because users form strong attachments to their e-mail accounts, which keeps them coming back and using other online services. Lycos, a pioneer Web portal, is focusing its comeback attempts on broadband entertainment content. It ranked as the 24th most popular Web site network in the U.S. in May with almost 24 million unique visitors, according to comScore Networks. Yahoo ranked first with almost 129 million unique visitors. Lycos has been migrating its Lycos Mail members to the new system, which it is adopting from its South Korean parent company Daum Communications. Changes to the user interface will be minor so the migration should be fairly transparent to users, he said. A user-interface upgrade with AJAX functionality is planned for later, he said. E-Mail for the iPod Generation Lycos hopes the upgrade will significantly increase the Lycos Mail user base of about 1 million by attracting new users like teenagers looking for their first Webmail account, he said. In other words, Lycos is hoping to lure "members of the iPod generation" and not so much someone who has been using a competing Webmail service for 10 years, he said. Lycos Mail is free but contains ads and its accounts are deleted if they aren't checked at least once every 30 days. For $6 per year, members can upgrade the account so that it's preserved even if it isn't checked once a month. Another upgrade option exists for $20 per year, which removes graphical ads and increases the storage to 5GB. All versions of Lycos Mail offer virus scanning but none offer virus cleaning. By comparison, Yahoo's Yahoo Mail offers, in its ad-supported free version, 1GB of storage and a 10MB limit on attachments, with virus scanning and cleaning. Its fee-based version features no graphical ads, costs $20 per year and has 2GB of storage and a 20MB limit on attachments. Meanwhile, the ad-supported free version of Microsoft's Hotmail features 250MB of storage with a maximum attachment size of 10MB and virus scanning and cleaning. For $20 per year, graphical ads are removed and Hotmail storage is increased to 2GB and attachment size to 20MB. Then there's Google's Gmail, whose introduction in April 2004 shook up the then morose Webmail market and sparked a wave of upgrades among competitors like Yahoo and Microsoft. Gmail, which is free and supported by text ads, offers a continually increasing storage that now tops 2.5GB, and a 10MB attachment limit. It also features POP3 support, which Lycos, Yahoo, and Microsoft only include in fee-based versions of their services. Gmail also scans for and cleans viruses. Reply with a "Thank you" if you liked this post. _____________________________ MEDIANEWS mailing list [email protected] To unsubscribe send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
