The email portal of lycos.co.uk closed on Sunday. For many email marketers the impact is likely to be minimal, although all those who have recipients with Lycos email addresses will now lose contact with these users, as no other ISP has stepped forward to take on the accounts.

My advice to marketers who want to understand and manage the impact of this change is simply to export and filter your data to identify those email addresses that are affected.  Key domains to search for include:

caramail.com
home.se
jubii.co.uk
jubii.de
jubii.fr
lycos.at
lycos.co.uk
lycos.de
lycos.es
lycos.it
lycos.nl
spray.se

I recently advised marketers in advance to use a segmentation query to identify all their Lycos related email addresses and send an email asking each contact to provide a new, opted-in email address. 

Those who didn’t undertake this exercise before the 15th may still find it a useful exercise, particularly if they are able to pull offline contact details from their database and follow-up their Lycos contacts with a letter or call. Go one step further and build contact history reporting into the query to pull those Lycos contacts who are recently or frequently active and have engaged in your email communications. This will give you a set of email addresses that are worth investing some resource into making sure you don’t lose them as contacts.

Tink Taylor
dotMailer