Apple previews new .Mac Mail interface
Apple is offering a teasing preview 
of its new-look .Mac webmail interface.
The obvious goal is to make it feel as much like using Mail.app as possible. Hence the general look complete with the much-loved Tiger lozenges, auto-completing email addresses from Address Book and message flagging.
It also adds bits and pieces from elsewhere: Ajax-like drag and drop à la Yahoo!’s new interface and inline display of the start of the message from GMail, but it also has a trick of its very own.
As a “.Mac webmail exclusive”, a Quick Reply feature lets you “dash off a response without leaving your Inbox”.
Will it be enough to silence .Mac’s many, many, many, many critics or even moderate their complaints? Only time will tell.
[Via TUAW ]
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Tags: Apple Mail, dotmac, GMAIL, mac, mail.pp, webmail
September 27th, 2006 at 11:28 am
Looks pretty good. Now, if they offered .Mac email account for free (like Gmail) then that would be even better. They can still offer for-pay services, but offering a 2GB free, .Mac webmail account would be very cool.
September 27th, 2006 at 12:32 pm
Why everyone compares .Mac to Google Mail I’ll never know. Can you use those 2 gigs of space they give you with Google as hosting space for a web site, or to share photos, or to sync your address book and iCal calendar? Can you use that space as a virtual hard drive accessible from ANY web browser (Mac or Windows)? Without some kind of hack, the answer is simply NO.
September 27th, 2006 at 1:15 pm
If you want free mail, go use Google. I, for one, appreciate not having ads pop up in my face, or forced sig files on every message I send out. .Mac mail is mail for the rest of us. Why does Apple have to be like everyone else? Think Different – remember?
September 27th, 2006 at 8:16 pm
@Mom: Allthough I partially agree with you, I have to say you’ve got your facts all wrong. Google Mail a) does not have ads pop up in your face (only text-based ads on the side), and b) does not force signatures on your messages. You’re talking about Hotmail here.
September 27th, 2006 at 11:32 pm
@DB: Actually, with a Google account you can create a website (Google Pages), share photos (Picasa Web-even has an iPhoto plugin for direct upload), and, while these last two are not without hitches, you can also sync your Address Book, and iCal.
AND, the photos, web space, and calendar information are not counted as part of your email space.
All are free, of course.
To me, the drawbacks (not being able to two-way sync Gmail addresses, and iCal) are not enough to warrant paying $100 per year for .Mac.
September 28th, 2006 at 6:58 am
I will get a .mac Account if they fix webmail and drop the price to $49/year (or free). Can you host a word press blog using .mac?
September 28th, 2006 at 12:47 pm
HonorGuy7,
You don’t have to pay full retail for a DotMac signup/renewal. I’ve posted a how-to save 20-50% off Apple’s $100/year list price:
http://homepage.mac.com/cherrypop/iblog/C1900478167/E20060925071526/index.html
October 5th, 2006 at 2:02 pm
I’ve been a member of .Mac since it was iTools and was free, I finally decided to give up my membership this year as free services became better and more viable. I’m became more and more concerned about Apple’s upgrade cycle for dot mac – it seems as if they only upgrade once a year when people like myself that began paying over 4 years ago start to drop off.
Gmail, Yahoo, Flickr, all pay continuous attention to their products. Dot mac is a forgotten child of Apple.
I don’t want to leave – but I’ve had enough.
October 27th, 2006 at 1:27 pm
[...] A month ago Apple announced a new look for its webmail service, based on the look of Apple Mail, powered by Ajax and with some keyboard shortcuts à la Gmail thrown in. [...]
November 20th, 2006 at 4:05 am
Is there some way to archive folders of Mail (running on my desktop, not on the web) so that I can remove them from my active folders, but restore them later if I want to?