Have any of you had troubles with your mac.com transitions to MobileMe? I hadn’t until yesterday when suddenly my mac.com email address — my main personal email — stopped working. Utterly, completely and totally stopped working. I received my last email at 12:31 PM. I sent a reply shortly after, and ever since, whether through my Mail application on my computer or through MobileMe on the web or my Blackberry … nada.
Seems that a “lucky” 1% of MobileMe users are having this problem. The discussion boards on the Apple support site are going wild. Apple, meanwhile, is being silent. The entire MobileMe transition has been, it seems, a bit of a clusterfuck, and the other day, Apple sent out emails to all their users stating that everyone was receiving an extra month’s membership for free as an apology. That was nice, especially since I hadn’t yet to notice any major problems, but I also don’t have an iPhone and wasn’t yet attempting to use any of MobileMe’s lauded syncing and/or push technology. And then, most suddenly, no email. Today, I finally tried to get some chat support from Apple to find out what was happening and when I might expect email to be restored. After waiting for well-over an hour, I finally was connected to a representative who essentially couldn’t tell me anything.
On one of the Apple discussion boards, I noticed someone mentioning that he had written to David Pogue, technology writer for the New York Times. I figured: Why not? I’m going to write him too; share my story, my aggravation, and most importantly, my disappointment in Apple, a company I have been faithful to and appreciative of since spending all of my Bar Mitzvah money (well over $3,000 in 1984!) on a first gen 128K Macintosh, an extra external disk drive (not hard disk, mind you), and an ImageWriter dotmatrix printer. I still will take Mac over Windows any day, but the way they’re handling this pretty major problem right now is extremely disappointing and leading to a lot of anger among the masses.
My email to Pogue after the jump:
Dear David,
I’m sure by now you’ve received dozens, hundreds/thousands of emails about this. I know I read about a couple on some of the Apple support forums. I have been a .Mac customer since Apple instituted the service. My first computer ever was a 128K Macintosh. I have not yet upgraded to Leopard, and I don’t have an iPhone, so any Mobile Me transition parts related to me have been completely on Apple’s end.
My mac.com/me.com email has been down for over 30 hours now. (The last email I received was at 12:30 PM on Friday.) The most disturbing thing is the utter lack of customer service in terms of response/explanation/updates during this period. I can neither send nor receive email, neither from my Mail application nor from Mobile Me on the web, and of course not from my Blackberry which doesn’t even recognize that the mac.com address exists anymore since it gets no response from the server with my login.
If I sign-in to Mobile Me and check the Account Status page, I see this message: “1% of MobileMe members cannot access MobileMe Mail. Service will be restored ASAP. We apologize for any inconvenience.” That very same message has been up the entire time that my email (and apparently the rest of this “1%” that seems to be a large group even if their message seems to want to indicate that it’s quite small) has been down. I started a chat session with MobileMe support during which the representative told me nothing other than that there’s a problem with the server housing my email account, their engineers are working on it, and they unfortunately can’t give any indication of when it might be back up and running.
Again … I love Apple. I have never owned nor never wish to own a Windows-based PC. I have to use one at work, and it annoys me constantly. I have a Blackberry primarily because of work restrictions and yet I hope to be able to get an iPhone at some time in the future. I have owned six different Macintosh computers, including my current PowerBook G4 which I hope to upgrade to a MacBook Pro with the next release of those models (assuming I can afford it at the time). I’m a huge huge fan and have always been a defender.
But this email outage has been outrageous, and the lack of explanation and communication has made it that much worse. Why not update the status message? Why not give us some indication of what’s going on? Why not temporarily throw the accounts onto a new server so that people can still send and receive email in the meantime, even if we can’t access our previously stored email? Why make us resort to using other email accounts should we need to contact people? Why make us feel nervous about the reliability of giving out our emails (this one I’ve had and used as my primary personal email since .Mac started)? What has happened to any emails that have been sent to us while the server has been down? Are they being held in wait or will they be lost? We can’t know because Apple won’t tell us anything?
I just wanted to add my voice to the ones from which I’m sure you’ve already heard. Maybe some publicity and pressure from the likes of you can help Apple be a bit more considerate of their customers rather than simply providing apologies for “the inconvenience.” A month or more of free service is nice, but at the end of the day, not having any information or ability to use my main email account for this period of time and who knows how much longer is worth more.
Thanks for your time.
Best,
Aaron Dobbs
Out of Focus 