In brief: Excite to offer free UK email

NEWS Internet search engine provider, Excite, has announced it is to offer free localised email to UK users. The company said this is the first time UK users have been offered such a service, although free email services based in the US have previously been available from organisations like Yahoo and Hotmail. Anyone that uses Excite as an Internet portal will be able to register for email addresses ending in excite.co.uk rather than excite.com. Excite is launching the service to collect revenues from local advertisers. It promises to roll the service out to European countries such as France and Germany, in the near future.