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.
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