A bouquet among the brickbats for .Mac
While .Mac has come in for (mostly) justified criticism in recent months (e.g. here, here, here and here), I noticed an improvement worth celebrating last night.
Three months ago during a rash of .Mac outages, downtime was handled quite differently by Fastmail (rare, detailed outage explanations, fast response) and .Mac (frequent, vague or incomplete outage explanations, lagging response).
Now things are much better. My .Mac mail was down last night. A visit to .Mac’s system status alerts showed much improved descriptions of what was wrong and how many people it was affecting.
I’m happy to bag .Mac when it deserves it, but I think that small advances like this are worth highlighting too.
It did start me wondering though. How many people does 2% of .Mac users actually represent?
Similar Posts:
- .Mac limps from outage to outage (for some)
- .Mac problems hit the big time
- Immobile me: An idle thought
- Yahoo outage
- Thirteen email blunders to avoid
Tags: Apple Mail, dotmac, mac, mail.app, outages, system status
October 5th, 2006 at 11:30 pm
“How many people does 2% of .Mac users actually represent?”
That’s easy: 1 user. .Mac probably doesn’t have more than 50 in total. *sncr* ;-)
October 6th, 2006 at 2:13 am
Since there is no way to notify .mac admin of email problems, how can we be confident that they in fact know what is happening and that the status reports aren’t made up numbers?
October 6th, 2006 at 10:06 am
The last time Apple announced it’s figures on this was at MWSF 06 (iirc), during which Steve said they had over 200,000 users. The service continues to grow in popularity (contrary to dumb pundits).
2% of which would be, duh, ~4,000 people. I was one of them.
October 6th, 2006 at 10:08 am
Thanks, Charles. I was one of them too.
October 6th, 2006 at 4:01 pm
“contrary to dumb pundits”
I was just joking.
October 6th, 2006 at 9:25 pm
Gotta love the odds of the people here using .Mac all coincidentally being part of the 2% affected by the down time. So I have to agree with Stephen.
I tried it and didn’t like it. I have more faith in my Mini running as a mail server.
October 7th, 2006 at 3:55 am
XIII – if it’s of any consequence, I wasn’t part of the 2% affected. My .Mac does what I need it to do. And the improved outage messages are definitely nice, though I have to say I rarely have any problems with my account.
October 8th, 2006 at 5:44 am
I’m a Mac geek but I’m letting my .Mac account expire (as of tomorrow) after three years of trying to convince myself that I had a good reason to keep it. I got it originally for homepage but I can use flickr to share photos for free. I also had a page of bookmarks that I published so I could access them from anywhere. I can use del.icio.us and do much more. There are free webmail services that are far better than .Mac mail. For me, it comes down to the fact that I’m just not getting enough for the money to justify the expense. I’ll still continue to use the three Macs I own but it’s time to say goodbye to .Mac.
October 13th, 2006 at 10:43 pm
Well, I am a Mac and Apple Mail newbie ( 6 months), and ‘Hawk Wings’ has kept me faithful to/interested in learning Apple Mail (with occasional flirtations with Entourage and Opera Mail (I used Opera a lot in Win world, as well as most Windows email clients at some time).
I am a longtime FastMail/IMAP user, and have a trial with .Mac. Tim , you use both FastMail and .Mac??
Not sure I am willing to spring for the $140/yr for .Mac. For a whole lot less with FastMail, I get double the storage of .Mac’s 1 GB. (But I know .Mac has lots of cool features…but $140 worth??). Then there is all the (free) space in Gmail -or Yahoo Mail – where I can dump/copy stuff…(but with slight reservations about privacy/security).
So, Tim – or others – you use .Mac and FastMail?? Which for what purpose?
The nice lady in the Mac shop extolled the virtues of .Mac today, but I might be better off staying with FastMail and spending the cash on a Lacie external hard drive or similar for backups…
October 14th, 2006 at 8:08 am
Steve – I’ve used Fastmail for years. I’m very happy with its features and service.
All the email that I really care about goes through Fastmail. The enhanced accounts (c. USD 35) are amazing value. And the automatic daily off-site backups and increasing server redundancy make me smile.
I have a dotmac account as well, for loyalty I suppose as much as anything, but I use it mainly for mailing lists and other things that aren’t as important to me. I hardly use most of the features that come with a .Mac account.
If I had to have only one, there are no prizes for guessing which one I would choose :)
October 14th, 2006 at 11:19 am
Thanks Tim
October 14th, 2006 at 12:50 pm
PS
I am an enhanced FastMale myself.. :-)
June 10th, 2008 at 9:59 pm
[...] Love it or hate it, it’s clear that the unveiling of MobileMe in yesterday’s keynote signals big changes ahead for .Mac. It needs some kind of change. Regular Hawk Wings readers will have seen .Mac come in for a lot of stick (and the occasional bouquet). [...]