Today I found in my spam box the following email. It looks as though it really did come from Lycos, although for some reason they sent it to an old email address and so it got filtered.

Customer information

Dear Matthew Chatfield,

As you might have heard in the media, the management and the board of directors of LYCOS Europe N.V. have decided to liquidate valuable businesses and cease unprofitable activities. Unfortunately the webhosting business is one of these.

This means for you, that we will continue providing our webhosting services for only a limited period. A solution is sought, so that online-presences of our customers can be transferred to another provider without causing adverse effects or additional costs.

We will inform you about any upcoming changes in sufficient time. Though details are not yet clarified, we expect the webhosting platform to be operating during the first quarter of 2009.

As soon as we have further details about the planned measure, you will immediately be informed. We expect this to happen in a few days.

We are sorry for any inconvenience this may have caused. We strive to enable a smooth transfer of your presence. We ask for your understanding that we cannot provide you with further information at this point of time. We also ask for your understanding that you might experience delays in response times from our support team in the next days as we expect an increasing volume of requests.

Please refrain from contacting our support team with request in this matter as no additional information can be provided by this channel at the moment.

We will contact you as soon as we have any further information.

Thank you for your patience and your understanding.

With best regards

Your LYCOS Webhosting Team

That almost certainly isn't good news. We've been using Lycos webhosting and as domain registrar for over five years. Pinkeye has several clients still on Lycos, altogether we are gradually moving them all across to our favourites EUKhost as each package expires.

If anything happens, we'll let you know. Meanwhile, if anyone's got any information - we'd like to hear it.

External link: http://www.thewhir.com/marketwatch/112608_Lycos_Europe_to_Sell_Close_Assets.cfm