I love Apple as much as the next guy. Probably more than the next guy. But today has been another day on which — as the .Mac outage report clinically put it — “100% of members were unable to access mail using an IMAP client.”

You can read some less clincal reactions from .Mac users on Apple Discussions.

Apple are very good at sending nicely produced, well-polished emails about new Apple hardware and software products and new items in the iTunes Store. It obviously spends money and effort in producing them. It cares about these things.

How hard would it be to send an email to .Mac users warning that “scheduled maintenance” is about to take place over an eight or twelve (or whatever) hour window, and that connectivity to .Mac services may be affected?

Fastmail can do it. Joyent can do it. The IT Department at my work can do it.

Of course, it is possible that Apple didn’t know everything would go pear-shaped. Someone tripped over a power cord and all the lights went out.

So, I am stuck in the horns of a dilemma. Is it more troubling that Apple doesn’t care enough to warn users beforehand, or that its mail engineers don’t know what they are doing?

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Apple has made a rare (and welcome) proactive move. It’s offering some advice to .Mac users currently experiencing a rash of annoying “enter your password” alerts in Apple Mail.

The solution is to take the account offline by clicking the “Cancel” option in that dialog and then taking the account back online again, which somehow out-foxes the problem. If not, the statement suggests, quitting Mail and restarting it will.

The post on Apple’s web site was made by someone described as a “.Mac moderator” which surprised me. I thought that Apple sacked all its discussion board staff ? Perhaps “hosts” and “moderators” are different things.

The note is a few days old and the problem seems to be persisting , but the .Mac Team is working on it.

[I've been getting them on and off, but do you think that I could get one while waiting for a screenshot for this post? No.]

[Via MacUser ]

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.Mac users are doing it tough again according to a report on C|Net’s news.com site.

Of course that’s hardly newsworthy. As Hawk Wings has reported in the past, the service has been plagued with outages for months.

Previously, reports about these problems have been restricted to the Apple Discussion Boards, “insider” sites like MacInTouch or little blogs. As far as I know, the C|Net report is the first mainstream site to cover the news.

And the news is not good. The report points out that,

Over the past four days, .Mac users have struggled to get its Web site publishing features, iWeb, and related file-share capabilities, iDisk, to work. Users have complained not only about the length of the outage, but also what they say is a tardy response from .Mac’s technical support team.

Apple declined to comment.

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Some Yahoo! users were left without instant messaging or email access on Tuesday and Wednesday this week, CNet reports :

“For a brief period early this morning, certain areas of Yahoo were inaccessible to a portion of registered users due to software-related issues,” Yahoo spokeswoman Kiersten Hollars said in a statement. “We have identified the issue and corrected it. We know that this may have caused some inconvenience, and we apologize to our users who might have been affected.

A .Mac user at Showngo found the outage extremely helpful therapy.

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