[Tsunami]

Originally Posted by thisisnotgood

If you can believe it, after 22 years of having free email service with them they decided to charge for it. It's really amazing, as Lycos is such a forgotten relic (like Netscape,MySpace ect) from long ago to have the guts to capitalize on them holding your email use hostage is quite ridiculous. This really shows that you have to stick with the HUGE profitable providers like Google, Microsoft & Yahoo (Verizon) to make sure that they don't put the noose around your neck! When I first got their email, it was quite big if I recall. The only REALLY safe way is your own domain.

Sadly enough you are spot on that the only long-term guaranteed free options are big companies such as Yahoo, Outlook/Hotmail, Gmail, ... Maybe add some regionally orientated providers such as Yandex, Mail.ru etc who in their country are as dominant as Gmail and Microsoft are globally.

Originally Posted by thisisnotgood

Not just Outlook and Gmail, I have had an aol/aim and Yahoo accounts for over 2 decades. Also a few mail.com/email.com accounts for almost as long, although they also started to charge for some of their original free features like forwarding but the basic mail is still free.

Note: as n5bb pointed out, the fat lady has already sung on Lycos.

Charging money for something as basic as forwarding to me equals "not free".