.Mac is down: Gather your children! Into the cellar!

Agreed. I've been a .Mac customer since it came online five years ago. Never serious problems. More reliable than anything else I've ever tried. The current failing and rebooting is clearly a symptom of merging with mobile.me or whatever they're calling it. I'm sure it will be solid once the transition is finished. Til then, expect some outages. But for heaven's sake, quite posting every time it goes down for ten minutes. It's getting duller than shit!

I noticed one different thing after the downtime. I've been all week on a course using a PC with Explorer 6. Everytime I accessed webmail.mac.com, I would get a page telling me that since IE 6 is not supported, I would need to use the old version of .mac. After the downtime this morning, the page was gone and the rich client (same as in Safari or Firefox) was displayed.

Why does anyone think MobileMe will be more reliable than dotMac. The services Apple provides using dotMac all use well-known, published protocols with multiple open-source implementations that they can choose from to use or implement their own. They've had YEARS to make dotMac more reliable and scaleable. And they still have multiple, UNPLANNED downtime every month affecting from a few percent of their customers to all of them. Every month. Now, they are transitioning to MobileMe, which switches to using brand new protocols, or proprietary, unpublished ones from Microsoft. Presumably more users as the service is more useful to Windows users now. Even if you ignore the initial transition problems [right now with dotMac and once MobileMe goes live], you have to be an optimist to believe that six months or a year from now, MobileMe will be as reliable as dotMac was before this transition to MobileMe started.

I'm not a .mac user - and with all the "it's down again" notices from TUAW, I don't think I'll ever be.

At least it's more reliable than Twitter.

the title of this post is HILARIOUS. Made me LOL real hard.

I cannot believe there are people who actually rely upon this service. When Gmail is unreachable for 30 seconds I get antsy.

I think MobileMe is really cool, but I could never trust Apple with my mail after the way mac.com has behaved over the last 3 months.

And for those apologistssuggesting this is to prep for the me.com transfer, I'd say that's piss poor planning to create outages for a migration. I was knocked out of Gmail when they went to v2, and Hotmail was never unreachable as it became Live Mail, Yahoo's beta is running ni parallel. Why can't Apple manage .Mac and the Apple Store without outages???

From france:
If i'm connected to .mac it works.
If i'm logged out www.mac.com redirect me to a MobileMe advert. This is new

Not only do I hope that .Mac is a little more stable when it transitions to MobileMe, but I wish that they'd fix my e-mail so that messages forwarded from addresses from my other domains would actually show up. It started less than a week ago, and is violently annoying.

How could MobileMe be out before 10.5.4?