Count me as one of the "small amount" of customers affected by this fiasco. I've been planning to switch my personal E-mail over to MobileMe (from Comcast) to take advantage of the "push" replication - but now I'm rethinking that plan. And for it to be out for four days! I'm an IT pro for a Fortune 50 company...it makes me shudder to think the reaction our management would have to that type of catastrophe. There's no reasonable excuse for this, especially given that there's *still* no expected resolution time after 4 days in the ditch! (Actually, I'm quite confident they know...they just won't admit the truth.)

Very, very disappointing...and a sign that Apple is not even close to being ready for prime time in the enterprise space.

Actually I found that .Mac was having reliability problems for a week prior to the switch over and I have been four days without mail to my personal account.

Apple's operational support is horrendous and I was banned from posting to forums because I pointed this out.

I used to work for AOL in production and if something like this happened people were fired. Developers were fired!

I blame the Director Of Operations. He is ultimate responsible for running a tremendously poor operation.

Additionally, Apple's unwillingness to be straight forward and tell us what is going on is extremely aggravating.

In my opinion, Apple should send all 1%-ers a brand new top of the line PowerMac. Then I won't have any hard feelings.

I haven't had any issues with my .Mac > mobileMe account either.

If ones "work" is so important, don't depend on email - Apple's, Google's, your company's...there are so many uncontrollable variables. Always have at least a plan B. Or at least something more reliable than email....

I had been at benjaminplaut@mac.com since 2005 and used it as a business and personal e-mail address. Since Friday morning at 9:37 a.m. pacific I have been unable to get or send e-mail. As with most people, e-mail is a business and personal lifeline, and I made the mistake of trusting Apple.

I bought my first Apple in 1982, had its poster on my wall.... used windows products in the 90s and for the past few years had an apple laptop and Sony windows desktop. I was scheduled to get an iphone and a mac desktop this weekend.

Now on day four without business or personal e-mail, I am basically done with apple. They make cool looking products and have a hell of a marketing department.

But there is a reason the military and emergency services people do not use macs. They are luxury toys for people who do not have to earn a living or be in contact with clients, friends, loved ones or business associates.

I live in Hollywood, where the creative community loves mac. That's OK, I understand it-- some of the stuff is cool.

But having clients, employers, customers and friends unable to reach you for days because a company sells products they can't support is frustrating. It is clear Apple ignores existing customers over potential new ones, and focuses on the next cool gadget rather than making sure basic infrastructure works.

If my system is back up and running soon-- say on day five or so, I might chicken out and stick with apple out of sheer laziness, entropy and stupidity.

But I am shopping for a windows laptop, looking at blackberrys and thinking about a Windows based desktop. The artist in me is alarmed, but I think products should, after all, work.

Good luck to those who stay with the pretty girl who doesn't work.

You might get lucky.

My email has also been out since friday. But more scary to me is that the CSR I "chatted" with, used many of the EXACT phrases notes in your chat. Its clear to me that this is set of canned responses with a lot of cut and paste going on. While you always train a customer service rep, it strikes me that this is really "too clever by far" electronic response to a real human problem.

I also use my email for business - and have been without service for 4 days. It has cost me dearly, and my clients unfortunately. The Apple Stores don't even answer their phones, the support has a 30 minute wait time, and there is NO info on the outage - just that 1% of the customers are experiencing outage - I suspect it is much larger than that. I've been extremely patient, but after investing thousands in Apple this month on equipment and a new setup, this is a grave disappointment!

At least I don't feel alone. After 2 hours with a Apple Care rep. I was directed to the Customer service "chat" online.. No one ever responded to me! They didn't even know what was going on at Apple Care. I also had to listen to India's top 20 songs while I waited!

Misery loves company I suppose. I too have been without email for four days. Apple's support has been non-existent. I empathize with all the other posters here. It's really unconscionable that customers of a paying service are being treated this way. I'm switching to g-mail.

Well here's a different... mine was set to expire on the 16th and we had a change in credit information... I have tried ever since to input new credit card information but have been unable to... they keep extending my expiration of my account but can't explain why it won't accept my credit card info... so i asked my chat buddy if they really wanted my money... they didn't have an answer... *SIGH*

I am a professional Photographer in England and depend on e-mail for communication and transferring pictures across the globe. I have been without e-mail now twice, once for 2 days on switchover and now since Friday am. I have contacted Apple support by e-mail, thank god I have another supplier and by phone numerous times without success, once the technician got a bit irritated and put me on hold, I rang off after 8mins of silence. I have had Apple macs since they were first introduced and decide to use .mac about a year ago, but after this fiasco I am changing to another supplier and will not be going back to mobile me

Don Hardy

I have to agree with many of you.. It is really frustrating how badly this all has worked. My email has been up and running, but syncing my contacts, calendars, etc.. has been a pain. And like many, im mostly upset about the lack of information.

I have been a mac user for only a year and this has been a big set back. But to be honest.. im light years away from changing back to windows. And its not just the products are a lot cooler, but in my use anyway, they are a lot better.

I was pissed off, but now im going to change my attitude and know that everything will start to work better again.

Namaste!

hmmm.. "Funny" thing happened after the last post that I sent. Now I can't open my mailbox anymore. So I guess now I'm also part of the 1%... It's like they noticed that someone had been left out of that "1%" group.. why did I open my mouth :).

Does anyone know a good site with most updated info about this whole thing. I seriously thought that everything was getting better, but I guess we have to wait some more.

My MobileMe Mail went down for a total of 3.25 hours this morning. Never went out during the "rocky" transition from .mac to MobileMe, thankfully.

One thing I've learned is to always have a backup plan. Don't put all of your eggs in one basket. Don't put all of your trust into one service provider.

While I rely on my @mac.com address dearly for some business and personal communication, its outage doesn't stop my business cold. Apple will smooth things over, and they will learn a hard lesson in the process.

It's unfortunate they choose the name "MobileMe", since it perpetuates the "me" stance in this world. We all must realize that Apple's success has not been a small feat. They've just acquired a million new customers, and that's a huge support task. However, their .Mac/MobileMe department does need to put more customer support in place. You can't even phone and speak to anyone.

We are longtime Apple users and former proponents of everything Apple. This has been the most ostentacious display of customer service arrogance I have ever seen. Since Apple won't let customers complain on forums without being censored, many of us are writing reviews of MobileMe on Amazon.com. So far there are about 30 negative reviews there. This may be the best recourse we have as it will hurt Apple in the pocket.

This is the 5th day without email for us, 1%ers. Since this morning, people tried creating threads stating that simple truth, it's the 5th day, not the 4th anymore. They were deleted by Apple censorship as soon as they were created. I did create one. The same happened to it.

And now, guess what: Apple has just pulled the plug! If you try to connect to the discussion forum, there is a little yellow post-it "We'll be back soon" and the message "We are busy updating Apple Discussions for you and will be back shortly".

Wow... this is unreal!

I'm also with our service and confused! Is there relief in sight?

Lets say its one server that is down. Who made the faulty server? What happened to the backup server? How about the redundant server?

Did management's disaster plan fail too?

Did the folks attempting to repair the one server not tell the people posting the Mail Status log that service has been down for several days? Because the Mail status log for several days says normal service has been returned.

Jim

5 days no mail for me. NO drafts. They too disappeared. I was told by one of my friends who works for apple and also has no .mac a week. one more week.
Yahoo!!
I don't really want the mobile me anymore. What I would like instead is a round trip ticket to Sweden so I can eat Swedish meat balls. Go shop a Real Ikea and drink vodka. ( do they drink vodka in Sweden?) All expensis paid of course.
Rachel

Finally! Some sort of explanation.
http://support.apple.com/kb/TS1953

Mobile me sucks. It worked no differently than Mac.com but it startd to kill my battery faster on my I phone. Then my e-mail stopped it's 7 days now,I can't get any help from Apple and I can't get anyone online through there chat sessions. I have waited up to two and a half hours. I get a run a round every time. Very disappointed with this mobile me and Apple for starting to become like MICROSOFT.

Thank you for this input

First of all, my email address is new. It used to be in the ".mac" category. We had to migrate to some mail system that works and gmail has had alot of positive press.

I have to tell you, I am a big MAC proponent, but this fiasco with mac email makes me think twice about spending money with the enterprise that is running it. Maybe I will just need to learn to deal with Wintel machines again. And yes, I know that hardware and the "service" that MobileMe is not technologically related (hopefully not), but I am part of the mac.com email customer base that got involuntarily converted to the mobile me crap that has created all the problem.

Readers please make sure you learn how to back up your emails on your hard drive. I didn't until it was too late, trusting Apple to take care of me (the home consumer, with students) and it obviously has not yet.

Finally, any bets on when or whether the "1%" service wii (I mean will) be restored?

I bet never. If it is, I will be looking for a way to migrate my emails from "me.com" (dumb name in the first place) to gmail.
I suspect more of a pain than I want to deal with, but I don't want to be a pawn as Apple tries to figure out on a test case basis on how to deal with a VERY RELIABLE Blackberry system.

Regards to all,

Pis.....I mean frustrated mac account user without email for over a week

"I haven't had any issues with my .Mac > mobileMe account either.

If ones "work" is so important, don't depend on email - Apple's, Google's, your company's...there are so many uncontrollable variables. Always have at least a plan B. Or at least something more reliable than email...."

I love these type of comments, apple can do no wrong, it's your fault cos you relied on something you paid good money for.
I mean come on man, some people have been without email for 7 days. This is a serious screw up on the behalf of apple.
A plan B is always a good idea though and don't use services like this for business they tend always be a bit flakey.

Really I was looking to find something to host business email on, from what I have read it seems that mobile me is not really about that.

ONCE again!!! I cannot get my mac .com mail!!!
The page is blank. This is preposterous!!!!

It's really sad that you are all so reliant upon such transitory mediums.

What do you do when the lights go out?
Who do call and complain to when there is a traffic jam?
What recourse do you have when things are not 100% flawless?
OH NO ! Life without email for 10 minutes?!

What do you do when there is no toilet paper?

You babies should stop crying "me" and start looking at the world around you and think about what's really important.

Do you think the people in Georgia or Afghanistan or Iraq are whining about email?!
Get real.