Lycos First With Gigabyte Mailboxes

Web portal Lycos has followed Google and Yahoo into the race to provide e-mail users with massive amounts of storage, and it claims to be beating these rivals already.

Lycos announced Tuesday that it is upgrading its service to give consumers 1GB of e-mail storage. But unlike some rival services being developed, the Lycos service is not free. Users will have to pay a monthly fee of 3.4 pounds ($6.01).

Google caused considerable excitement last month when it announced that it was developing a free service called Gmail and that it would give all users of this service 1GB of storage space–far more than the 2MB offered by MSN’s Hotmail, for example. But the plans also alarmed some people, because Google said it intends to scan e-mail messages for keywords and insert targeted advertisements into the messages.

Read the whole story at CNET News.com.