Review: new .Mac webmail delivers, mostly

Apple teased us with an announcement of a .Mac webmail upgrade at the end of September, and yesterday they delivered. The new webmail feels zippy (though it was understandably a little sluggish a couple times while I was testing it last night), and the innovative, refreshing new features raise the bar for competing services. Still, with all the slick new polish, a few long-standing gripes have yet to be addressed, and some of the web client's new abilities bring along irregularities and new complaints. But don't think I'm a hater - I just renewed my membership last week, and this is a most welcomed update to one of the most important components of Apple's hotly debated .Mac suite of web services. With this yin and yang balance in mind, let's dive into the review.

.Mac webmail goes web 2.0
Of course, the most significant and obvious upgrade is the completely revamped UI, which now resembles and behaves (in some ways) like Apple's desktop Mail.app client. As you can see from the screenshot, a new 3 pane view offers a folder list on the left, a customizable (10-50) message list on top, and a message preview pane on the bottom, just like mom used to make. As an added UI bonus, the separation bar between the message list and preview panes is draggable. Nice.

But the webmail update isn't just skin deep - plenty of keyboard shortcuts accompany the new polish for a great combination of beauty and brains (though I'm laying down a penalty of 10 points by not enabling the shortcuts by default, regardless of who .Mac's demographic is). A complete list of shortcuts is linked from the preferences, and there are keys for nearly every action including: sending messages, deleting, navigating up/down messages, back/forth between batches of messages (take that Gmail), searching and printing.

Besides keyboard shortcuts, some clever features and UI tricks are peppered throughout. On the left is a shot of an Address Book search, which lives below the folder list. Results are displayed below the search box, and clicking on a name offers a popup with their information, and things like email addresses and public iDisks are linked for easy access. On the right is the Quick Reply window, accessible by clicking a button which appears next to selected messages (a quirky 'only when you clicked on it' UI element that first reared its head in iTunes 7). Opera's built-in email client has done this for a while, and Apple's implementation is nice and simple.

Address Book came along for the ride, too
Address Book on the web also received an update, as it features a new UI and functionality. Keyboard shortcuts are present here as well, including keys for emailing, editing and deleting contacts. A list view is now accompanied by a grid view (pictured, though blurred to protect my peeps), and the same linking behavior is also present, such as clicking an email address to create a new composition window addressed to the contact.

Am I using Mail.app, or Webmail.app?
An interesting choice from the webmail team in their goal of bringing desktop client UI to the web is the behavior of creating a new message (shortcut: n, as you might imagine). These new messages are created in new windows (in fact I had to give Firefox's popup blocker permission to open my first one), and I actually can't find any way of writing a message in-line, like most traditional webmail UIs (see: Hotmail, Yahoo!, previous .Mac). I'll bet this might be jarring to both traditional users and everything-in-a-tab nuts alike, though it certainly does have that space-age 'hmm, am I using Mail.app, or my browser?' feel to it.

Other desktop functionality has transgressed the web realm, like dragging and dropping messages. Holding shift allows you to select more than one message, and you can then drag them all into a folder. However, being that I'm talking about a browser and not a true-blue email app, this is where the new .Mac webmail experience gets a little lost in translation.

One of these things is not like the other
So far, Apple's done a good job of infusing .Mac's webmail with some serious functionality, but their goal of re-creating the desktop look and feel with some clever web technologies falls short in a few key areas.

The first, which the big G has already pointed out, is the unfortunate boundaries these web technologies are confined in. For example: you can hold shift and select more than one message, but you can't use the arrow keys to make these same selections. Now it's very possible this is a minor point at best (it could be argued this is a practice for the über-email nerds in the crowd), but it's still a good example of all the little behaviors that simply don't translate well from Mac OS X apps to web technologies.

Another more glaring flaw in the new webmail is the lack of rules. Mail.app has a powerful rule system providing users a lot of flexibility for automatically sorting messages. While .Mac syncs these rules between desktop clients, .Mac webmail doesn't utilize them, so all my messages are waiting in my inbox on the web (including junk messages, still), whereas Mail.app would have filed them away like the good little email secretary it is. Now I can understand the limitations of web technologies when it comes to fulfilling some of these features, but I think these issues highlight some significant discrepancies in .Mac's implementation of the 'desktop client on the web' concept. Maybe some of this can happen when web 3.0 (beta) rolls around.

All things considered: nice work, .Mac
Let's face it: no one can please everyone, but this new webmail is pretty hot, considering everything .Mac is up against, like a segmented demographic and high expectations from the nerdier half of it. All in all, I'm pretty satisfied with the new webmail digs, and I'm glad to see Apple putting a strong foot out onto a crowded dance floor with the likes of Gmail and the new Yahoo! Mail Beta which, might I add, has been in 'beta' since, well, the term was invented. The new .Mac webmail is a well-rounded offering, even with a few holes to patch, and I think it'll make most customers at least a little happier they spent that $99 on a membership.

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Source: http://www.mac.com/1/webmail.html

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Apple teased us with an announcement of a .Mac webmail upgrade at the end of September, and yesterday they delivered. The new webmail feels...

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Kenneth Ryland

I realize I am a bit out-of-date with this post, but I still want to comment on the new .Mac Webmail.
It's definitely an improvement, but it has a lot of shortcomings.
.Mac used BrightMail for spam filtering. It does a lousy job. It catches very little.
No font choices. No background choices. It's the same plain text on white background. It's functional but not elegant.
Performance is very clunky at times. it is anything but "swift."
As a longtime .Mac user I am still (maybe I'm a sucker) looking for better value for my money. Technology from other companies is fast outstripping Apple's online offerings. If they want to stay in the game, they need to do a lot better than they are doing.
Mail messages should be allowed to be tagged in addition to placing them in folders. Then you could search for the tagged messages at a later date if you were looking for something in particular.
There is no message filtering with .Mac Webmail. This is an absolute "must have" feature.

December 06 2006 at 10:21 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Ted Walters

I recently (i.e. in the past 2 weeks) let my .mac lapse. This was after I saw the preview shots of the new interface. Here's why: I was able to get WebDAV (same as what iDisk uses), IMAP, storage, etc. from fastmail.fm for far cheaper than .mac. Moreover, if you have your own website, many times they come with IMAP. Thus, in essense I was paying $99 for the sychronization features. With Google Sync on Firefox this goes a long way to addressing one of my core needs: full sychronization among my comptuers browsers. You can configure iSync to sync with WebDAV. iWeb to me is a joke. Nice looking sites but terribly slow-- to the point of being utterlly useless.
Apple needs to decide on whether .mac is really something they want to continue to invest in. I think that their programmers are losing the battle quickly here. All that would need to happen is to have Gmail adopt IMAP and you have yourself a total .mac killer.

October 31 2006 at 10:17 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Gunnar

The new webmail is light years better than before, although still not perfect (the address book function is still a bit clunky).

I do agree with Randy M above: how about a "Web 2.0" version of the iCal information I am ALREADY synching through dot Mac? How about ANY version of a functioning Calender even if its only "Web 1.0" (whatever that means)? If Google Calender can do this for free, surely Apple can do something better considering we are paying them for this service.

Despite the gaping hole in Calendar integration, I still feel .Mac is well worth 99 dollars a year. A drag and drop ftp site, cleanly designed webspace for my photos, and autosynching of all my computers is worth 8 bucks a month to me. I know a lot of this can be had for free with a combination of various other web services (flickr, dropsend, etc) but 8 bucks is totally worth not having to deal with annoying adds and traffic limitations.

October 29 2006 at 3:40 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Jonathan

Response to #7. GMail is not free at all - you pay for its use through Google scanning all your e-mails so that they can target their ads on the pages at you. You have no privacy in GMail.

.Mac has no ads and your privacy is preserved. Also, as mentioned above. GMail is a POP account, Yahoo is a POP account, Hotmail is a proprietary Windows mail account which makes it inaccessible on anything non-Windows (other than through hacks). POP accounts are extremely limiting and annoying to use due to their lack of synchronisation across machines. Hotmail is just crap full stop.

You also don't just pay for an e-mail account in .Mac - whether it is worth the money you do pay for it is a matter of personal taste.

Btw, if you click a name in the Address Book, you will see the full card for that person and it shows you both Home details and Work details, so if you need access to the secondary e-mail you can get it that way. It is annoying that not all e-mail addresses are shown though.

One other nicety not yet mentioned - when composing, if you type the first few letters of an e-mail address in the To: etc fields, the e-mail addresses that match are listed as they are in Mail.app itself.

October 27 2006 at 8:57 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

David Chartier

RE: Spam filtering

If you want to get technical (after all, this is an Apple blog), .Mac *does* do spam filtering, and it's why I chose my words carefully in this review. Here's Apple's Support doc on the topic:

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=86748

Apparently they're using BrightMail, of which I have no knowledge. From my general experience, however, I'm wondering if they're using a version from, say, 2000, when spam was a different animal.

Perhaps .Mac is scoping Amazon and other discount sites for a good deal on a new license?

October 27 2006 at 5:42 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Nobody need ever pay $99 for .Mac, it is $78.96 from Amazon.

October 27 2006 at 5:16 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

J.G.

.Mac does use server-side spam filtering. I get more spam in my gmail account than my .Mac account. If you're getting a lot of spam in your .Mac account, just imagine how much they are already filtering out for you.

#7 Since when do you represent all gmail users? How is .Mac pointless for gmail users? I hate the fact that gmail is POP only. I work on mulitple macs and pcs and love having to only read/organize my .Mac email once and have it synced to all my mail clients. However with gmail, I have to mark a mail as read in Trillian, then mark it as read in Mail.app, then mark it as read in gmail.

As far as smart folders, I would imagine they're working on it. True, I would prefer to have them now though.

I have to disagree with people that say $99 is too much. I think it's totally worth it for IMAP, iDisk, a webpage, and all the various sync abilities (keychain, addressbook, mail settings, bookmarks.. ) Heck just being able to pop up my personal address book from my work PC is worth the $8 per month.

October 27 2006 at 4:34 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Victor Agreda, Jr.

Not having some elementary spam filtering (from what I can tell) is hugely disappointing. Apple is looking like Microsoft before they took "the web" seriously. Yahoo and Gmail do so well in this area, yet Apple flaunts their security record... anyone see a PR nightmare coming around the corner?

October 27 2006 at 1:41 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Mike

For what I'm paying PLEASE give me some SPAM filtering. I get so much spam on my .mac account, that it's practically unusable.

October 27 2006 at 1:33 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

J.V.

I like the new look and and feel...

But is it just me or why canÂ´t I get the grid view for the address book on Safari? It wonÂ´t show me the bar where to choose this! When I open up the new Firefox everthing is fine. But without the article and the pictures above I wouldnÂ´t even know about this feature! Already tried resetting Safari and deleting caches!

Anyone else experiencing this?

October 27 2006 at 1:23 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply