MobileMe looks to finally be stable as Apple recovers lost e-mail

By Ed Oswald | Published July 30, 2008, 1:10 PM

Apple said late Tuesday that mail service to customers affected by the MobileMe outage should have full access once again, ending for some what became a three week ordeal.

Since MobileMe launched on July 11, at least one percent of all users have been unable to access e-mail properly, and in some cases losing access altogether. Making matters worse, Apple said over the weekend that it lost some e-mail messages during July 18 to July 22.

Apple now reports that all messages have been recovered, and full service should be restored to those affected. The company has also set up a dedicated chat application that will serve to assist those who may still be having problems with MobileMe.

"By completing this restoration of Mail services, we hope we have put the vast majority of MobileMe Mail problems behind us and can now focus on improving other aspects of this new ambitious service," Apple said in the update.

Some scattered reports of persistent MobileMe issues have appeared across the Web, however they seem nowhere near as widespread as before.

Still, Apple did disclose another minor issue that affected some customers on Monday. Contacts and calendar data was not properly syncing over-the-air to iPhones and iPod touches in some cases, causing data to disappear from the devices.

The bug was fixed late in the afternoon, which restored the data for most customers. Some user may have to restore manually, however, and Apple provided instructions for doing so on its support site.

Comments

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Well at least they fixed it while it was still free. I imagine people would be far more irate if they'd started paying that huge subscription fee and were still getting a problematic service.

Personally I'm happy syncing my calendar & contacts with Google on the iPhone, and using IMAP to get my mail. But then I've never understood the need to get instantaneous e-mail (as opposed to e-mail 10 minutes late).

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Apple is consistently rated high in customer service and I think they used everything at their disposal to fix this problem as quickly as possible. I have to use Windows at work and I have never received a single response from MS to the myriad problems I have encountered. I have given up contacting MS. I Google the problem and try to fix it myself. I often find there is no fix in the works to bugs that are celebrating anniversaries since their discovery.

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How about moving on to fixing MobileMe on Linux? It would sure be nice if MobileMe didn't tell me that if i want it to work, i shoudl use Firefox, when i'm already USING firefox on my Linux machines...

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