I’ve already had my grumble about the overall value of a .Mac account, but recently four more posters have added their voices to those who wonder about the feature-to-cost benefits of .Mac.
Matthew Russell at macdevcenter.com wonders why 
in this day and age there is no server-side spam-filtering. “My $100 a year per account should at least buy me that ability,” he says. Without it, he is open to every spammer’s email fishing attempt.
Retrophisch has decided not to renew his .Mac account. It’s not worth it. Apple no longer offers any virus protection package with its .Mac account, and Gmail offers him more space and a faster user interface at a much cheaper price.
In a post titled, “Why isn’t Apple jumping in?”, the author at atasuki.co.uk is bewildered by .Mac’s lag in picking up the new features offered by Web 2.0 services.
He lists a number of things that would make .Mac much better—tagging, deals with Web 2.0 sites like flickr, delicio.us and Last.fm to bring greater integration, making FileVault work with iDisk, and more. Lastly, he suggests, “integrate iChat with a VOIP provider like Wengo. The AIM deal was great for its time, but the world has moved on and frankly so should you.”
Finally, Steven Frank, co-founder of Panic, Inc. (Transmit, Unison, Stattoo, etc) believes that:
For the pro Mac user, the .Mac service has always been a bit of a hard sell. It’s great for the more consumer level user, but for the geeks it’s getting harder to justify by the day.
He lists cheaper, often free alternatives to many .Mac features in a useful post.
He is going to renew though. It’s syncing that has him by the short and curlies:
So, having said all that, when my .Mac renewal comes up in three days, I’m probably going to renew. Even though it sometimes acts strangely, I’ve become dependent on syncing, and I think that’s really the only reason I’m renewing at this time.
I have been a .mac subscriber since before they charged for it and I agree with all the comments you reported. It is an incredible concept and syncing is cool (if not buggy). But for $100/year, it just isn’t worth the money or the hassles.
Last year, I had decided to let .mac lapse for all the reaons you mentioned in the post. At the very last minute, I changed my mind and renwed. This year, I don’t think so. The tipping point is for me SPAM. I get dozens of junk messages a day and maybe 1 good one a week. For $100/year, I’d think Apple could have a challege-response system in place (like Earthlink) since they alredy have my contacts which are being synced.
Anyway, Apple has to does something drastic and quickly if they want to keep .mac around…
If Apple integrate traffic tracking tools into .Mac/IWeb I’ll stay with it when it comes up for renewal. With something like box.net giving 1GB free WebDAV storage, and syncing services with things like Plaxo, Bloglines, and GCal, .Mac is looking less and less appealing (I don’t want free GarageBand loops, how about some exclusive iWeb templates instead) compared to a standard co-lo. I do like the “set-it-and-forget” factor though, and it would be an effort to switch from .Mac.
I’m a very lazy professional consumer :-/
I’ve been tempted not to renew .Mac every year (I’ve had it 3 years in May), but I love the sync feature, and I do use my iDisk regularly. I’ve had email through mail.com ’s forwarding feature for the last probably 10 years, and I am finally going to cancel that, because I get more spam from them than anyone. So, at this juncture, I have to decide to use gmail or mac .com. For at least the next year, I’m going to try .Mac, hoping that I am going to get some storage space for my $100 / year.
I believe that Apple needs to reduce the yearly fee or offer some new features to make it worth the yearly fee (don’t ask me what those new features are). It can be a real problem not renewing your .Mac account if you have been using your .Mac email address as your primary address. I recently decided to start using my gMail email address as my primary email address in case I decide not to renew my .Mac subscription.
I forgot that if I do not renew my .MAc membership I won’t be able to use iChat, damn, Apple.
I used to have a .mac account but I let it go when it expired. I felt it was too expensive.
Today, I use the newly released Google Firefox Browser Sync plugin, which allows me to synchronize my bookmarks om both my home and work computers. I use Gmail for email and contacts, and that is backed up using POP3 and Fetchmail.
I wish Apple would distribute their servers more evenly across the world – using iDisk from Australia seems very slow, and the syncing of addressbook/ical data doesn’t seem to be very reliable – often it takes a couple of attempts before a full sync is successfully done.
My biggest gripe by far about .Mac is the webmail interface. Not even the fact that it isn’t all Ajaxy, Web 2.0. Simple things that it doesn’t deal with well are a constant thorn in my side. When I get mail from anyone who uses the email at my school (web interface or Outlook), it comes across as LastName, FirstName . This is fine except that when I try to reply, I get an error that LastName is not a valid email address. “No kidding!” I say. I have filed support for it at least twice to no avail. The failure of Apple to fix simple, glaring bugs like this is what makes me cringe that I pay $100/yr for the service.
[...] Over the past few months, a number of people have noticed a sharp increase in spam in their .Mac accounts and have wondered why a premium service like .Mac doesn’t include server-side spam filtering. [...]
I gotta say that I love my iDisk. I send work home and back through it all the time. But that 1 gig does seem awfully tiny, especially when used with Backup.app.
I’m still waiting for them to bring back full webCal posting. The nerfed iCal publish is pretty lame. Just to be able to add events to your online iCal would be worth a chunk of that subscription? (30boxes style)
Personally I’d love to see more done with the iWeb hosting. They’re already web hosting, why not give members a complimentary domain name?
I just renewed my .Mac account for $55 including shipping, using a serial number from a .Mac box sold by a third party. I found it via Froogle. Works for purchases and activating trial accounts too, perfectly legit. Apple says:
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=302032
More:
http://homepage.mac.com/cherrypop/iblog/C1900478167/E20060925071526/index.html