RSSApple: Oops, some MobileMe e-mail lost forever
By Ed Oswald | Published July 28, 2008, 12:40 PM
In its recently created status blog for MobileMe, which has struggled with downtime since its launch earlier this month, Apple admits it lost some e-mails during a four-day period at the height of the outage.
A poster identifying himself as "David G." continued to stress that restoring full e-mail access to the 1% of users who had lost connectivity was Apple's first priority. Web access for 40 percent of that 1% was turned on Saturday, and feedback was said to be "positive."
The blog post first appeared on Friday evening, apparently at the behest of Steve Jobs himself. It is likely that widespread criticism of Apple's lack of communication on MobileMe's problems in the media had something to do with the move toward transparency. However, it's not clear why the full name of the Apple employee was not disclosed.
At first, the company said that 10% of e-mail received between July 16 and 18 was lost, although a post on Sunday night indicated a different time period for lost e-mails: between July 18 and 22. It is not clear if those mails on July 16 and 17 have now been "found."
Otherwise, full e-mail history had been restored to customers, although messages received during that four day period are time-stamped July 23, Apple said.
"If you need the actual date for particular messages you can take advantage of the ability to view long headers in MobileMe Mail (via Preferences) to peer into the log and find the actual mailing time and date," David wrote.
He promised another status report on the service "early this week."
Users posting on Apple's support forums are reporting the MobileMe situation is getting better, although some say the company needs to do more than just post status updates on a blog for those who may have been adversely affected by the e-mail loss.
Some suggested the company should provide free service to the one percenters, or even put together some type of deal on the iPhone 3G for these people.
But the Cupertino company may have some ground to stand on in refusing to compensate in that manner. MobileMe's terms of service states that "the service is designed for personal use and not intended to be used for commercial business purposes, including, but not limited to, transacting online sales or software distribution via an e-commerce site."
"Apple Just Works". Everyone else is wrong.
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The one thing about all this mess is that while the TOS is designed to shied them from commercial pressure, it doesn't consider much else.
I (as others caught in the drought) have a life that doesn't live in a city willing to wait for your email to begin working again.
Some of us JOB SEEKERS who were foolish enough to assume that a paid email service would be a little more reliable than a free one, got burnt by this big time.
I moved out to california and have been job hunting for a couple weeks - sending resume's and riiiiight about the time I'd expect a couple responses, poof... email no work-y.
2 weeks of effort in 'racing' against other candidates on craigslist and the like burnt up like so many rolls of toilet paper in a freak gasoline fight accident. And what might I have found in my inbox yesterday?
Why a couple of responses to opportunities that have already been filled.
Joy. Thank you .Mac! If any compensation were to be awarded in a case like mine, perhaps an interview would suffice. And here's to the potential employer responses lost in the 'oubliette', my apologies for using a email service that doesn't have a contingency plan for failed servers. Let's hope it's a lesson learned. I know I've learned.
gmail is now the default. A pox on the IMMoblieMe.
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This is nothing but a conspiracy against the greatest company on earth. This sounds more like something Microshaft would do. I refuse to believe this until I'm buried.
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so based on your comment you know what you're talking about... meaning that you know a lot about how to set up an e-mail server, right?
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I refuse to believe this until I'm buried.
May you remain delusional and obsessed for a very long time then. You'd be far less entertaining feeding maggots.
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haha, everyone is getting their panties in a twist about nothing...hahahah
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I wouldn't give a s*** if their marketing slogan wasn't 'it just works'.
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Apparently you've never sat in front of a Mac...
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I have.
The first one kept overheating. Apparently their cooling system wasn't quite up to par with the dual-core config they were shipping.
Had it in the the "Genius Bar" 3 times over 2 years. Gave up the last time and replaced it. It's now sitting in our "graveyard" (where we put the hardware we're just not quite ready to recycle yet) in case we go insane and want to try and start it up again.
of course, there's also the ibook who's hard drive just recently died. Wow. That was fun replacing. The genius bar wanted $300 to replace it (A $60 drive...if you wanted to buy new). Did it myself, but only after following a 20 page PDF detailing how to actually get into that locked down POS.
Yeah...Macs just work.
Perhaps you should have a peek at any of the hundreds of Mac support forums one of these days.
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Hey internetworld7, you are wasting your time trying to convince those Windows sheep that the Mac rules. Problem is, half of those narrow minded monkeys are broke, build their system themselves without any sense of design whatsoever and marvel at their blue neon fan spinning in the dark while listening to the beautiful sound of the 15 fans braced everywhere inside the case making more noise than a Boeing 747 on take off.
Aah come on guys this is funny! Have a sense of humour!
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Reminds me of Amazon S3. Not ready for Prime Time, personal/business or otherwise.
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How long has email been around, how long has redundancy in servers been around? To not get this right with all of the load and stress tools available just shows how young apple still is. Apple is running solely on hype just as microsoft use too, they should have learned that it doesn't last long...
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Comparing the two companies even slightly is cause enough to be shot. Apple could never be that inept, incompetent, and worthless. Apple always has been and always will be the greatest company known to man.
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"the greatest company known to man"? HA HA.... and the Miami Dolphins are the greatest NFL franchise "known to man" hahahahahahahahaha
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You're right they are not THAT but MORE inept, incompetent, and worthless than them.
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Well, this is sad, but for all Apple has been telling everyone for the past ten years about how they are "ready for business" and trying to break into the serious, enterprise space, they really aren't...and they won't be for quite a long time still. They just set themsevles back ten years with this screw up.
Now, if Microsoft was smart, they would jump on this opportunity and do one of those "I'm and Mac and I'm a PC" commercials totally rubbing their noses in it for this screw up. That would shut them up for a good long while I would think.
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With new technology being released on average every six months, saying it will push them back ten years couldn't be any more far fetched. This is their phone service that links to their email service. I admit their roll out of MobileMe is far from what they probably expected. As with Apple in the past they generally don't roll out crap products. It's not like we are talking about Microsoft here who rolls out products with major issues, like power cords, drives not working, major networking issues, video crashing issues, ram issues, file copying issues. Now lets push XP, many games at launch would not run along with plenty of application compatibility issues, along with hardware compatibility for older hardware past win98, activation wizard crashing and not being able to activate forcing reinstalls of the os over and over.
Now if those didn't set back Microsoft's Game console, or Microsofts company in general. I am sure MobileMe isn't going to set Apple back to far. With no product releases you need to expect some problems.
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http://blogs.techrepubli.../?p=154&tag=nl.e550
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People will forget about this story within a week brotha ;-)
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shame..lolz..'Mac OSX Donkey' sorry 'Mac OSX leapord' is also this type of s***! Mac sucksss
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haha, what a moron
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LOL just LOL
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But otherwise - it just works..?
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Unless you try and access mobileme from Linux, then "It just doesn't work"
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Ok ok...so the saga of win vs. mac's continues. There's an old saying that you don't argue with ignorant people because they will bring you down to their level and beat you. Well in this case with every blow everyone just keeps getting a little bit lower than before.....
In the end windows still owns the majority of desktops in the world. Plan and simple...Now thanks to Microsoft releasing Vista my employment has been reassured for the next generation.
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Congratulations! You just joined the clan of ignorant people!
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