Lycos leaves users in limbo

Lycos users have been without email access for most of this week, after what was supposed to be a routine server software upgrade went awry.

Lycos offers a free webmail service, plus a subscription service that offers more storage space along with access through popular email clients such as Outlook.

The company earlier warned Lycos Mail and Lycos Mail Plus users that service would be down for part of Tuesday, due to routine site maintenance. Lycos spokesman Brian Payea said the interruption was scheduled to install updates to the company's database software that would improve backup capability.

The upgrade turned out to be more complicated than originally anticipated, Payea said, requiring Lycos to rebuild the database.

"We thought we'd have it up by now," Payea said. "But there are billions of pieces of mail in the database, and we have to rebuild all of that."

Payea said saved messages and other customer data have been retained, and incoming mail during the outage is being saved for delivery once the system returns to normal. Lycos expects to have the mail system running again by Friday.

David Becker writes for News.com