.Mac limps from outage to outage (for some)

You have to feel sorry for people in Charles Dale’s position.

For almost a week now he has been emailing me with news of outages in his .Mac service.

At first, I felt sorry for him but was sure that the problems would soon be rectified. After all, while .Mac doesn’t guarrantee access to your email (see the .Mac Terms and Conditions ), it is a premium service that markets itself with the promise that “you will always have access to your email”.

But, in fact, the problems persisted. Look at the outages he’s suffered:

These interruptions are only affecting “some” members, although the threads on Apple’s Discussion Board suggest that it’s rather more than a handful.

And users must be a little nervous about having their service restored. “Some” have found that all their email was deleted after the most recent outage.

I guess it is a very complicated system. I can’t think of any other reason for these ongoing outages or why “some” users were unable to use .Mac’s sync services for 51 hours (as reported in the Network Status section of the .Mac home page).

UPDATE: Darren has also been saving screenshots, and sent in some which show a longer history:

By way of comparison, there was an outage at Fastmail on 26 May:

Outage for 30 minutes for some users

One of our new frontend replicated servers crashed, but didn’t give up its IP to the other server. This meant that 50% of users (depending randomly on which IP you had been given) would have had trouble connecting to web, IMAP, POP and SMTP for the last 30 mins.

We’re trying to find out why the automatic failover didn’t kick in, and also update our warning systems so that we’re paged faster if a problem like this with the new replicated servers occurs again.

Within 10 minutes the news was posted on the service’s RSS feed, explaining what was going on, how it is being fixed and what steps are underway to improve the service. If you have to have an outage, that’s the way to have one.

Tags: Apple, Apple Mail, dotmac, email, mac, mail.app, outages, sync services

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• Spam-busting: Mail.app and Thunderbird compared
• Rui Carmo spanks .Mac
• More .Mac grumbles: value, missing features

This entry was posted on Monday, 5th June, 2006 at 12:03 am and is filed under Apple, Apple Mail. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

16 Responses to “.Mac limps from outage to outage (for some)”

1. DWalla says:
   June 5th, 2006 at 1:20 am

   I have a .Mac account and haven’t had any outages at all. This must be an isolated issue.

2. Tim says:
   June 5th, 2006 at 1:33 am

   Hi Doug. I haven’t had any issues either, but I am cautious about drawing conclusions on how widespread it is (or isn’t) from a statistical sample of one.

   That’s the problem with “some”. I covers quite a range.

3. DWalla says:
   June 5th, 2006 at 4:16 am

   I suspect it must be a particular .Mac server or regional outage… I’ve been on .Mac since it’s original inception and haven’t had any of the outages I’ve read about. Not saying it isn’t happening because it obviously is, but it must be tied down to some particular servers or regions.

4. James Katt says:
   June 5th, 2006 at 4:38 am

   I haven’t had outages in years.

   Perhaps some people have problems. But the large majority don’t.

5. nerradv says:
   June 5th, 2006 at 4:52 am

   My service has been down several times in the last few months. The last two have been for several days. Apple doesn’t acknowledge the whole down period if the service flickers in and out as with the one right before this current trouble. It has been frustrating to say the least.

   I just can’t believe that we don’t get some kind of refund or reduction in our fee. Cable companies have to do this if your service goes down. Why not Apple?

   I like the features of .Mac but I think it is about the worst area of customer service they have. They need to start focusing on it.

6. ckuehne says:
   June 5th, 2006 at 8:14 am

   I’ve been using .Mac since iTools was first introduced, and have experienced some, but very few outages, but I was also unaffected by this recent spate of outages.

   Maybe it could be broken down geographically. I’m based out of Los Angeles, and have been okay. My brother-in-law, however, in San Francisco, told me that his email had been disrupted.

7. Anthony Helm says:
   June 5th, 2006 at 10:32 am

   I’m one of the affected .mac users mentioned in your article. Thank you for blogging it. I’ve been a long time .mac user and this is the first time I’ve had any significant trouble in almost four years. What is irritating is Apple lack of response to messages I’ve sent to Support and that fact that their outage wiped out four years of mail! This was not a full account, but rather an archive of the “important” messages.

   We’re supposed to be trusting this paid service to manage our email on their servers. I find their “support” wholely unacceptable at this point.

   However, if they are able to restore my mail and reply, I will gladly let you know.

8. Brian says:
   June 5th, 2006 at 12:52 pm

   I started with iTools as well, and after the free period expired I never switched to the “pay” version. Why? Because during the free period they gave us of .Mac I was constantly having outages or general funkiness; that’s something they should have sorted before they decided to start charging for it and the fact that they didn’t told me .Mac was not a service I wanted to have to rely on for mail delivery.

9. GraXXoR says:
   June 5th, 2006 at 9:52 pm

   I’m in Tokyo and I suffered with sync problems for days, just when I was reinstalling Tiger! So I guess it’s not regional.

   I didn’t notice problems with mail, so maybe many of the “I haven’t had any problems” should include “with mail” perhaps they didn’t try syncing during the outage.

10. Charlie says:
    June 6th, 2006 at 3:47 am

    Now since Sunday around 1 PM EDT, I live in New York the .Mac discussion boards have been down. I click on the link and wait 2 minutes. I then get the message that the URL can not be found on the server. I sent a message to Apple saying their discussion boards for .Mac have been down now for 24 hours. What gets me is this is a service people pay for but it is not run that well. I use free e-mail web based services like Hotmail, Yahoo Mail, G-Mail and they are run better then Apple Mail. They also have better features then Apple web based Mail in.Mac and these other services are free. I thought Apple would do a better job then the other free web based mail but they don’t. I hope someone from Apple reads these comments and complaints and wakes up and gets their head out of their as*.

11. GraXXoR says:
    June 6th, 2006 at 10:07 am

    But why would they? People buy into .mac because it Apple, not in spite of it.

12. Charlie says:
    June 6th, 2006 at 10:50 am

    Because they should want a service that is better then everyone else’s. Apple should want .Mac to be The Best !!!

13. Gibbons Burke says:
    June 8th, 2006 at 12:18 am

    Speaking of .Mac outages, I can’t POP in to retrieve my mail, and I’m getting this message when I try to log into .Mac webmail:

    .Mac Mail on the web is temporarily unavailable. Please try again soon.
    .Mac customer support can be found at http://www.apple.com/support/dotmac

    .Mac Mail steht zur Zeit nicht zur Verfügung. Bitte versuchen Sie es später erneut.
    .Mac Support-Informationen finden Sie hier :http://www.apple.com/de/support/dotmac/

    Mail .Mac est momentanément indisponible.Veuillez réessayer plus tard.
    Vous trouverez de plus amples informations sur .Mac ici :http://www.apple.com/fr/support/dotmac/

    ご迷惑をおかけしております。現在、.Mac Mailはご利用いただくことができません。お手数ですが、しばらくしてから再度お試しください。
    なお、.Macã®ã‚«ã‚¹ã‚¿ãƒžãƒ¼ã‚µãƒãƒ¼ãƒˆãŒå¿…è¦ãªå ´åˆã¯ http://www.apple.com/jp/support/dotmac/ にアクセスしてください。

14. Mom says:
    August 1st, 2006 at 2:12 pm

    I love how people can type anything online these days, and it’s now “NEWS” and it’s accurate.

    I have had zero trouble with .Mac for months. I’m a heavy email user, and have an EXTENSIVE web page published. No problem here. But, since I don’t have anything bad to say, it must not be news.

15. Graxxor says:
    August 1st, 2006 at 8:25 pm

    Mom,

    I’m not quite sure where you’re coming from, but you clearly know best in that you do have nothing to say.

    I’m glad you’re not having trouble. However, your problem free use does not invalidate “news” from the apparently growing number who are.

    Write back when you have something other than a snide comment to make.

16. stochasticprocess says:
    August 1st, 2006 at 11:22 pm

    The responses to this report (and to the recent CNET article) seem to be divided into 3 groups:
    1. It hasn’t happened to me - so there is no problem.
    2. .Mac users are whinging because they expect too much

    and 3. Reports of issues, together with opinion on the quality and value of .Mac service

    Look at the system status text box on the .Mac page and it’s a level of service that most B2B companies would go out of business over; Apple can get away with it only because of their loyal (and often non-technical) consumer base.

    Having used .Mac from day one (literally the day it was announced), I don’t feel that I’ve been getting value from their service and I do feel that it’s only acceptable to those who have no choice.

    I’ve just changed my auto-renew pref and will let my subscription lapse at next renewal.

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