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Apple's MobileMe mea culpa

After all the problems with its MobileMe service since its admitted "rocky" start Apple has posted a status page at the behest of Steve Jobs that keeps affected users abreast of what's happening with the service.
Written by Jason D. O'Grady, Contributor
AppleÂ’s MobileMe mea culpa
After all the problems with its MobileMe service since its admitted "rocky" start Apple has posted a status page at the behest of Steve Jobs that keeps affected users abreast of what's happening with the service.

Apple's first update was posted on Friday stating, in part, that an email outage affected 1% of subscribers and that it was able "to restore limited web access to those accounts so the affected members can use their browsers to read mail that has arrived since last Friday (though not before) as well as send and receive new mail."

The blog-style page also admitted that Apple has lost some subscribers mail permanently:

We particularly regret to report the loss in the affected accounts of approximately 10% of the messages received between July 16 and July 18.

An update posted to the page late Sunday provides more information to the afflicted 1%:

We turned on web access to their current email yesterday and the feedback has been cautiously positive. Since then, we've restored full email history (minus the approximately 10% of mail received between July 18 and July 22 which may have been lost) and the ability to access email from a Mac, PC and iPhone, to over 40% of these users, and expect the remainder to be restored in the next few days.

Some MobileMe email was also re-dated during the fiasco, but Apple finds a way to turn that into a positive, touting long headers as a "feature" of the service.

A note of clarification to these 1% of MobileMe users – all of the email you received between July 18 and July 22 was placed on our new server on July 23 and was stamped with that date as a result. 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.

It's funny how Apple keeps referring to the "1%" figure because it sounds so low. Apple has an estimate 2 million MobileMe subscribers so the number of affected subscribers is around 20,000 users. MobileMe is working fine for me, but I don't use it as my primary email account. About 25% of the people polled at our PPUG meeting this weekend were still having problems with their MobileMe accounts.

It's refreshing to see that Apple is making an effort to communicate better with customers, I just hope they get it resolved soon.

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