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? dotmac, apple mail, mail.app, .mac, outages, system status

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.dotmac, .mac, outages, sync services, apple, email, mail.app, apple mail