The .Mac to MobileMe transition: what you need to know - Page 3

hi everybody,,
my problem is that
My .mac account expires in 90 days. After seeing me.com i will be upgrading to the family pack for my wife and kids emails etc.
I have been writing a lot of code using AJAX and it performs well on all of the browsers mentioned. what i do for that one .. please sugguest me .. as soon as

Hi,

OK, at the risk of looking very noobish, I'm going to ask a potentially stupid question as my first post.

I have never used .mac in the past .... didn't think it was worth it. However, I now have a Mac at home, a Mac at work, an iBook and an iPhone, and syncing all four of these units has proven to be quite cumbersome, if not impossible.

My question is, will the new mobileme handle email other than .mac and .me accounts? I pretty much use my personal and work email for everything, plus my gmail account, and really don't want to add another email address.

Will mobileme sync my comcast.net email, or does it only work with .me/.mac?? If it did, that would be amazing! If it doesn't, well, I guess I understand.

Hope this makes sense. Thanks,

Tom

Welcome to AI, Tom.

MobileMe only offers one email service and it only needs to offer these as all your other accounts are maintained by the mail servers that govern them. The beauty of .Mac/MobileMe is its other services. I've had it since 2004 and still don't use the .Mac email address for email.

It will keep all your Macs and iPhone's bookmarks in Safari, contacts in Address Book, and calenders in iCal synced. This means you can alter one of those items on any one of those devices and they all sync right away.

Email is just a simple addition to the Mail app. I use Gmail IMAP across my Macs and iPhone. They are all maintained by Gmail and have the same info. The other option you have with mail is having one account forwrd emails to the other. For instance, you can have Gmail forward your mail to your MobileMe account. But as stated, you don't have to use the email portion.

If you don't use the email, you can allocate more space to iDisk. This means that a file you drop onto your iDisk folder in FInder will be available in the iDisk folder of every Mac that you have your MobileMe account signed into. It's still resides on Apple's servers, but you have direct access to it.

One oft overlooked feature of .Mac is the storing of your user account preferences. That includes the items you see below. Other apps can use it to to save preferences. The ones not shown are Bookmarks, Calendars, Contacts and Dashboard Widgets. Except for the items that you are aware of, nothing else is auto-synced, but you can restore or create a user account on machine that is exactly like your other machine. Keychain is encrypted and would require your system password to access. This has become less useful with the inclusion of Time Machine in Leopard, but it's still nice to have, especially with multiple machines.

May I just add my $0.02 for what it's worth... I'm guessing that if you don't use the MobileMe email service, you will be missing out on "push email" won't you? I have made the transition from .Mac to Googlemail, but if I was paying for MobileMe I would swap back. Why? Firstly thanks to IMAP, shifting all of my mail across is one simple drag and drop in Mail.app. Secondly, I just need to set my GoogleMail account to forward all incoming mail to MobileMe. I don't ever need to worry about changing that because my Googlemail account won't ever run out. And thirdly, since MobileMe is also IMAP I can set it up to view at work via Thunderbird or Outlook on my PC.

Even further than that, I can access my email via the Ajax webpage on a PC that will even feel like I'm using a Mac.

So there are quite a few good incentives to start using that email account you will be paying for. To be honest it was the best thing about .Mac and so for me to pay for MobileMe and not use the email service would be a bit silly.

Thanks for all the information, everyone!! Most appreciated.

Tom

I've just been informed by a friend that if you no longer have a .Mac account then your username is up for grabs to anyone... Contrary from what people have been telling me on here.

I just tried to sign up for a free trial using my old username and it doesn't let me. Does that mean someone has already taken it in the first week, or does it mean it's still reserved for me? If so, how do I reactivate it?

If you go tot the "forgot password" section and put in your ID it will bring you to a page that lists the domain name for your account name. While not conclusive, if it shows the domain name for your email it may still tied to your credentials. I've let my .Mac account name lapse for over a year and still had it tied to me.

Of ocurse, things could have changed with MobileMe, but the info you were given may have been about how things were handled in the past.

That was a good idea, thanks, but unfortunately it didn't really help. I was taken to an Apple ID lost password page - and that's the thing - my Apple ID is still my old .Mac address. Surely if someone had taken my username I'd have had to give up my Apple ID?


It'd be interesting to find out exactly where I stand...

1-800-my-apple

I'm in the UK

But not to worry, it looks like my panic was in vain. You were right to suggest the password reset - I did so (to my new password) and signing in again worked. Phew! So now I have the option to join back up.

Thanks for your troubleshooting help!

The discontinuation of such beloved .Mac services as iCards has been insult added to injury considering Apple's MobileMESS!

I think it's ridiculous to have such limited compatibility. Basically you can get .me or .mac email at home or on your iPhone but anywhere you are not in control of the software, it's a disaster. This means at work, at a friend's house or any public PC. Just imagine you're traveling in the far east for a couple of months, internet cafes will not have the latest version of Explorer (forget about Safari/Firefox) and you'd be without email.

Philosophically this strikes me as a very nichy mindset. But Apple is trying to be a mass producer now, to have a widely popular email platform. If so they should have limited access across different browsers. Any clues about Apple considering improving this situation?

IE7, FF and Safari account for about 70% of the worldwide browsers as of June. IE7 is not fully supported, but you can at least read your mail. This, plus the fact that most people aren't going to come across IE6 or earlier browsers makes it mostly a moot point, but I would have thought it would be simple for Apple to add a non-Ajax portal for browsers that don't fully support their new design.

I'd have to say that 70% isn't enough - if you have 3 places you want to check your mail, the chance of all 3 having IE7, FF, and Safari is 70%^3 = 34%.

I have one location that I'm forced to use ie6 on... which means MobileMe can't be my primary email system.

The math doesn't quite work out that way because all things are not equal. People using MM probably have Macs and therefor reside in places that does grant them easy access to modern computers with modern browsers.

If you discover that you'll be tooling around small villages of 3rd-world countries then all you have to do is have your MM mail forwarded to any other email account you would like.

Fair enough.
This negates any usefulness in the 70% statistic you quoted for the same reason though - since it all comes down to whichever computer you can get to

I don't have stats on the average browser use among .Mac/MM users or I would have used them, but I'm sure Apple knows exactly what browsers people use to accessed their .Mac site (though Apple is quick to push people to a newer format). You just have to put into context. If 70% of the world's internet capable computers are using browsers that can access MM mail, then the chances that the percentage of those who have signed up for MM will have proper access it is much higher.

I think this will become painfully obvious over time, but may not be so from the get go: email is about mobility and this implies compatibility.... so you have a nifty set up at home which you keep up to date and where you have read 95% of your email in the last 3 yrs. now you're doing that backpacking trip around the world or have to travel to China etc. are you supposed to wait weeks/months before you can read your mail? are you supposed to switch to gmail before you head out? is this what Apple wants .mac users to do?
we rely on email because it's ubiqitous. if you spend the next 20 days in a location that falls in those 30% without IE7, what good is .me for you? paid email should be as accessible as free gmail IMHO.

Steve Jobs sends internal email to employees about the MobileMe fiasco admitting what we all knew should had been done to begin with (not that we wouldn't have botched Apple in many more and harmful ways had we been in charge, but this one was pretty obvious).


They've also restructured the MM group so that it's under Eddie Cue, who reports directly to Jobs.
(Click the link to see an image of her).

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http://arstechnica.com/journals/appl...ples-standards

Click for full size -

On this one I completely agree! I've used them fromt he beginning-- OK call me a lazy, unoriginal, crank-- but I've loved them and also enjoyed seeing all the original and creative things other .mac users had put in for me to choose from. Losing iCards was exactly what you say-- an insult, and disservice to paying customers. Somehow I do not remember Apple ever calling that "free"-- I thought it was part of the "service" for which I have been paying since day 1 of Apple's adventures on line.

Anyone remember that first one-- what was it called? All I can really remember is that they strung Christmas Lights and sprinkled snow across the site in the Yuletide season!