LYCOS Email service withdrawn

Email bounce rates could be spiking all over Europe this month as LYCOS stopped it's email service on the 2009-02-15. Apparently this was communicated in the press and on their websites over the past few weeks, but I don't know anybody who heard about it.

In fact, the first I heard about it was today when a friend directed me to http://www.lycos.co.uk/ after spotting consistent bounces for that domain - "The server isn't even taking connections". The further information page doesn't really tell us much more.

Further investigation suggests this is a pan-european service withdrawl. I'm not much of a multilinguist but these pages all seem to be saying the same thing:

• http://www.lycos.de/
  
• http://www.lycos.dk/
  
• http://www.lycos.es/
  
• http://www.lycos.fr/
  
• http://www.lycos.nl/

I couldn't find any information on http://www.lycos-europe.com/ either. Curiously this seems to have not affected LYCOS.com which is still offering email services.

You may have already heard of this and taken appropriate steps. If not, and you're using a mailing service with a strict bounce policy, I'd avoid sending to these domains until you've discussed it with your service provider.