Excite To End Free E-Mail Service

We’ve all heard and perhaps used GMail, Hotmail (Outlook) and Yahoo! but who has heard of Excite? If you haven’t, like the other three it is a free e-mail service, and has in fact been around longer than Hotmail, longer than Gmail, indeed longer than Google, starting life in 1995. Excite was one of the biggest names on the nascent Internet, and like the other three ISPs offered a lot more than free e-mail, including a search engine. Like most large companies nowadays, Excite has a complicated history which need not concern us here, but soon, its e-mail service will be no more.

Recently, the company announced it had made the “difficult decision” to close all e-mail and related accounts from August 31. The slightly not so bad news is that existing users can migrate to a paid service called Bluetiehome which opens the following day.

The basic set up will cost 14.99 a year (presumably $) with the premium service costing another 10. This compares very favourably with Hushmail and Protonmail, which are still offering free services (with encryption). Although the new service isn’t free, neither are Gmail, Yahoo! or any other “free” services, because you are the product, as the curiously familiar advertisements that follow you as you surf will testify.