Lately, Microsoft Hotmail, rebadged as ‘whatever the current name + Live’ has been very slow to come up, which has nothing to do with the speed of my machine, and much to do with the inability of Microsoft to scale the services along with all the other ‘Live’ services it’s hawking these days. It is getting on my nerves, and I’m really peeved since I pay for the premium version.

Yahoo has always been slow, the interface is clunky, and for the life of me, I cannot figure out how this service ever got any good reviews. Calling this service slow is like calling wheel-bearing grease slightly viscous. Deleting some of the scads of junk I get with a Yahoo mail account at one time is simply not possible, the interface will not work like any other Windows program by allowing shift and scroll to select and then delete. The interface says the system will not allow it.

GMail is very nice, and I like my GMail account, but it just doesn’t have the pizzazz or cachet it has had in the past. It was much cooler when fewer had it, and you had to be invited.

So, if you want to have an address that others don’t, hurry, and go to Lycos for their offering of a 3 GB mail account, with the ability to use large attachments, and good speed.

Lycos has been in the business for a while, and never really went away. It was eclipsed by Google and Yahoo, but it is coming back. It will not allow the users to experience the lag and slowness that are now typical of Hotmail, and always expected with Yahoo mail. Partnered with Ask, it is making a move to come back big - get an account now, you won’t be sorry.

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Tags: hotmail, yahoo mail, gmail, lycos mail, ask, microsoft, portal, search engine