Lycos Mail's interface sorely needs an overhaul. It uses the standard Web-mail layout, with folders on the left and a fully sortable in-box on the right, but a large animated ad above the in-box consumes more than one-third of the screen. Its tools are hard to find, too. The Compose and Options buttons are tucked away beneath the list of folders; they're so far down, you may have to scroll to see them. Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo Mail put these tools above the in-box, where they belong.
That said, Lycos is surprisingly feature rich, albeit not quite in Yahoo Mail's league. You can create up to a dozen filters for moving mail from your in-box to your folders, you can run messages through a spelling checker and colour-code mail from specific senders to make it easier to find, and you can check up to five external POP accounts from within Lycos Mail. Lycos has a built-in spam filter, but at its least-aggressive setting, it didn't trap any of the spam samples we forwarded to it. You can also create a list of addresses that Lycos will automatically accept or reject, but the service provides no calendar or notepad, and Lycos also lacks Yahoo Mail's and Gmail's search savvy. And while you can import addresses into the address book, Lycos would accept only half of our 2,000-name contact file before we ran out of space.
To its credit, Lycos offers an e-mail support option, though you'll have to drill down a couple of layers into the online FAQs to find the contact information. Also, be prepared to exercise patience in waiting for a response. We sent a question and received an answer one week later.
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anil
29/08/2008, 12:45 AM
rating
10/10
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Miss Macross
20/07/2007, 03:21 PM
rating
3/10
Lycos failed my virus test. I have another email account that got some email viruses and was flagged by that email server's AV scanner. When I sent that email to my Lycos account, not only did Lycos not catch it, I was able to download the viral attachment. Not only that but some of the junk mail I got there have links to download viral content. Again, Lycos allowed it to happen and did not flag the user that the link was viral.
The interesting thing is that at the home page of mail.lycos.com, it states that it has virus checking. Talk about your false advertising.
Pros: - Current upgrade allows 60% of junk mail out of inbox.
- Large user space to store emails.
Cons: - Did not check my attachments for viruses.
- Did not bother to stop me from clicking a viral link.
- Before, user control was spotty as junk mail spilled to the Inbox.
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ourtern2
30/01/2007, 06:25 AM
rating
3/10
I have been using Lycos for years with few problems aside from spam. That all changed when they 'new and improved' the site. I didn't rec email for ~ 3weeks, although tech support insisted it was being delivered. The site itself goes down regularly now. Very sad.
Pros: Free, lots of space
Cons: inconsistent service, lots of down time, spam filtering is pretty bad
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