Filed under: Bad Apple, .Mac, MobileMe
Unlucky 1 percent of MobileMe email users may get relief
How big is one percent? If it's a surcharge on your restaurant check, not that much; if it's a point on your mortgage, ow. If it's a chunk of .Mac/MobileMe email account holders who are left hanging for a week without access to their email... well, let's just say that anyone in that select and sorry lot who used a mac.com email address for professional or vital communications is justifiably furious right now.The good news, if you can say that under the circumstances, is that the outage that started July 18 may be coming to a close. Apple has posted a tech note on the ongoing issues, launched a blog to cover the MobileMe introduction challenges, and provided some additional details about what happened. As of 10 pm PDT last night, the one-percenters should be able to log into MobileMe webmail and retrieve messages from the July 18–25 outage window, though none from before the problem started are available yet. Apple also warns affected users NOT to change MobileMe passwords, aliases or storage allocations until the problem is cleared up, so be alert.
As the problem was triggered by a "serious issue" on one of Apple's mail servers, some messages got dropped in the bit bucket and will never come back (unless you have them cached in a local client like Mail.app, Entourage, Thunderbird or Outlook). Apple's statement:
While the vast majority of your email messages will be fully restored, a small percentage of email messages in the affected accounts have regrettably been lost. This includes approximately 10% of messages received between 5:00 a.m. PDT on July 16 and 10:20 a.m. PDT on July 18. We sincerely apologize for any email messages you may have lost.
Apologies are well and good -- but considering the MobileMe terms of service, that's about all you can expect to see, as Apple isn't liable for lost business or damages due to the outage. If there's a lesson in this, maybe it's that mission-critical users should own their own domains and public-facing email addresses, so that they can redirect incoming mail in a crisis. Depending on a single provider for mail (even ones with a reputation for reliability) can bite you.Written by Michael Rose. Thanks to everyone who sent this in.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
umijin said 9:49AM on 7-26-2008
It's worse that what you describe for me. ALL my past messages from December 07 to date were lost. I got one email from Apple saying they were extending MM service a month, then that one disappeared as well last week.
This is messed up.
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Jash Sayani said 9:51AM on 7-26-2008
I did not face many problems. But definitely, GMail (the free service) is much better than Apple's MobileMess (Called as MobileMe by Apple).
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David Chartier said 9:52AM on 7-26-2008
While I know this is definitely aggravating and I hope Apple does something for the affected users, I think there's really just a lesson here of "backup, backup, backup." I've lost mail with independent hosting providers, and lots of other people have had similar experiences with services outside of MobileMe.
A week or two ago Gear Live, a tech site like TUAW and Engadget, lost a couple day's worth of posts from its main page due to its host moving database servers over a weekend.
It's always a terrible thing when web services go down, but the fact of the matter is that it happens. From the best, most expensive providers to all-in-one solutions like MobileMe, stuff goes wrong. You *have* to have a backup plan in place. Period.
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Taylor said 9:56AM on 7-26-2008
Backup is important and all, but the thing is, where is Apple's back-up? What about the woman who lost hundreds of important e-mails?
Michael Rose said 10:03AM on 7-26-2008
DC, of course you're right -- I think Apple's suggestion of recovering mail from a local client is an endorsement of the 'backup!' approach.
The problem is, cloud services are designed to be location-agnostic. Many of the affected users only accessed mail via the webmail client and had no local storage. Others may have depended on webmail for archiving, or only synced an IMAP client intermittently -- and speaking of IMAP, when your server freaks out, your instances of your mail folders freak out too (unless you've made separate local copies).
My point in the post is that if you're running your business via 'myshophere@mac.com' -- stop now. Start using a reliable DNS host and mail forwarding so that your public-facing address is 'boss@myshophere.com' and put whatever email system you want on the back end.
Ed Pummelon said 10:02AM on 7-26-2008
Whilst "Backup" is indeed sound advice, it should be a given. Saying that it is a lesson to be learned from this situation, is just a disingenuous way of misdirecting people away from the main issue here, which is that Apple have dropped the ball, badly.
No amount of free months or anonymous postings on their website will recover the image and reputation damage that they have rightly suffered as a result of this.
Don't misunderstand me, I am a huge Apple fan, own a great deal of their products, and use their software almost exclusively. Nevertheless, my email is going to Gmail permanently, and I will not be touching any new Apple product launch again until it has had time to prove itself.
Every company screws up, but to do so on this scale, and to communicate with your customers so poorly, is simply terrible business practice, and they deserve to take a hit for it. If anyone should be learning lessons from this, it should be Apple, not us.
David Chartier said 10:02AM on 7-26-2008
@Taylor: she should have had them backed up. Like I've been saying, this kind of thing happens with lots of other hosting providers, from Gmail to Media Temple and my host (DreamHost) from time to time. It just does.
**Technology goes wrong sometimes. It's a fact of life.**
Gmail was never able to recover the messages from the accounts that have disappeared, and it's usually the same situation with other hosting providers. I think Gear Live was able to get back some or most of the entries that its host lost, but users typically aren't so lucky. Apple says it can recover a good portion of these messages, but the process is ongoing. At least there's a chance here.
Let me also be clear: I'm not being an Apple apologist. Between MobileMe and all the problems in iPhone OS 2.0, I think July 2008 is Apple's worst software release in at least 5 years, if not much longer. This has been an absolute debacle.
But the fact still remains that technology goes wrong. Period. People **need** backup habits because things like this happen. They just do, whether it's Apple or someone else.
David Chartier said 10:12AM on 7-26-2008
Michael Rose: You know that isn't a bad idea, and I never meant to come off as disagreeing with it. .Mac had intermittent issues like this, and the transition to MobileMe isn't leaving anyone with a better impression of its reliability.
Perhaps Apple's slogan should've been "Exchange-ish features for the rest of us who shouldn't be running a business on this service that still needs some serious ironing."
Or is that too long to be catchy?
David Chartier said 10:20AM on 7-26-2008
Michael Rose: That's a great idea, I never meant to come off as disagreeing with it. .Mac proved itself to be fairly unreliable in this regard, and this transition to MobileMe isn't helping anything. I think you may be right in that MobileMe just can't be relied on for mission critical business work.
Perhaps Apple's slogan should have been "Exchange for the rest of us who aren't running a business because this just can't be trusted yet." Or is that too long to be catchy?
David Chartier said 10:22AM on 7-26-2008
OMG, first my comment wasn't appearing and I thought TUAW lost it, then I rewrite it only to find that it finally appeared so I wound up replying to Rose twice.
MobileMe's quirks are affecting TUAW comments! Backup your, uh... comments!
David Chartier said 9:54AM on 7-26-2008
Speaking of Gmail and lost data: what about the stories of accounts disappearing for absolutely no reason? Hundreds of thousands of messages just gone in a snap, and Google having no way of recovering them? I had the same thing happen to me a long, long time ago when I regularly used Hotmail; my entire account just emptied out one day.
This kind of thing happens to everyone. *Every*one. Backup, backup, backup.
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Christina Warren said 10:48AM on 7-26-2008
My only issue with this is that the way that Mail.app's IMAP works is that even if you have hard copies on your local account, removing them on the cloud side (or even changing folders or "archiving" with Gmail) immediately deletes those messages, without a trace from the local folder. No, not the IMAP specific folder that you have to be online to access, the local folder.
You can't get that stuff back -- and doing frequent Mail.app mailbox backups (which are kludgy and don't back up per account, but per mailbox, meaning you have to manually backup your Inbox, Sent and Drafts folders each time) is not the solution. Mail.app shouldn't delete stuff from the local account without any notice (at least not without putting it in Trash or something) and backups of full accounts should be much, much simpler (something Microsoft actually has correct with how Outlook's PST files are archived).
Backup, backup, backup is great advice. But for something like e-mail, even the most anal-retentive of us have a hard time maintaining a DAILY e-mail backup if they have a large account. I used to do weekly backups before moving everything over to Google Apps.
And as for Google, yes, I have no doubt they have had problems with disappearing accounts, but I've had a Gmail account since April of 2004 (we're talking maybe 10 days after Gmail was announced, thanks to a friend at Google who got me an account at the very beginning) and I've never had any issues whatsoever with mail deletions, nor have I even heard anything from anyone I actually know (and its easily hundreds of people that use Gmail or Google Apps as their mail server). I'm absolutely sure it happens, but compare the number of users who use Google and the number who use .Mac/MobileMe, I guarantee the rate is significantly higher for MobileMe issues. The backup mantra doesn't change the fact that Apple needs to get its shit together.
What I'm bothered by is that there seems to be no system in place for data redundancy. Even Microsoft has had a system in place for years with Hotmail, now Live Mail, where users who didn't log into their accounts within a certain period of time could recover all their mail (that automatically deletes after 30 or 60 days or whatever it is) by paying $20 and subscribing to Live Mail Pro or whatever. My dad had to do this -- he hadn't logged in for something like 6 months on one account (forgot he had it), needed something from it, paid the $20, had access to all of his messages. To me, this proves that redundant backup measures certainly exist, and while MobileMe is hardly comparable with the size of Live Mail, for $100 a year, it is something they need to invest in.
kirk said 12:58PM on 7-26-2008
Shouldn't your offline mail backups be in your Time Machine backup of mail.app's files? Until the push feature for mobile me came out, I've never really used my dotmac email account, but have been using it a lot lately. Until the burp last weekend I'd considered using it as my primary. So I don't know how that would work. With the exception of a few hours last weekend when my phone and Macs couldn't access the dotmac account, everything has been intact. Hence, no need to go into Time Machine to fish things out.
Exchange is better now, but it had problems too. Where I worked at in the early 2000s there was a massive Exchange server crash that brought a multibillion company to a halt for a few days. When it came back data was lost, deals were lost. Sadly massive screw ups like this are how companies make things more redundant and bulletproof.
If only some of the 1% of dotmac users lost data, that means whatever that they had worked on 99%+ of the other accounts. It is pure hell for that 1% for certain.
I'm one of the 99% of people who didn't have a problem. I did get a dud iPhone 3G and when I got a new one at the Apple Store yesterday it was awesome that as soon as I added my me.com information into the new iPhone, my contacts, bookmarks, and calendars were back on the iPhone. And it was great I could show the Genius my crash log for the old phone on my Mac at home via Back to My Mac.
After being burned at work and home by lost data I always backup the important stuff. *really important* emails I'll even save a PDF and save in multiple places both at home and in the ether.
"The Cloud" concept is exciting but it is still pays to back up stuff, even if it is on another cloud.
mi_sat said 8:52AM on 7-27-2008
DC: Now that you've (appropriately) spooked me to backup GMail, how might I do that from the GMail website?
I backup everything else regularly, even filling a 1TB drive to capacity. (Come to think of it, I should back THAT drive up.)
David Chartier said 3:34PM on 7-27-2008
@mi_sat: Best way to do that would be to add your Gmail credentials to an email client like Mail, Entourage, Outlook, etc., and regularly download your email. This can be done manually or automated with various tools. Then, ideally, you can backup those download folders with tools like Time Machine, SuperDuper, ChronosSync, etc.
I hope this helps!
Sean Robbins said 10:07AM on 7-26-2008
Eh, I worked for a web hosting company in recent past and this brings back memories. Maybe Apple did a little rushing to get mobileme to the public or maybe it was just a un-for-seen issue. S%!& happens, servers go down, If it's that much of an issue and you are loosing "thousands" of dollars, then invest in a dedicated server! I had people call me all the time, Ohhh, I'm on your shared server and I cannot receive emails and I am loosing thousands of dollars a day. SERIOUSLY? If I was making thousands of dollars a day, I would invest in growth, have access and know exactly where my information was being stored.
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Ed Pummelon said 10:10AM on 7-26-2008
Of course you and DC are right - any negative impact on customers as a result of this is their own fault for not backing up.
No, I'm not being serious.
totoro said 11:27AM on 7-26-2008
1) Yes, you should back up, and take responsibility for your data. Fact of life about computing today.
2) But part of the big selling point of cloud computing (and thin client networks way back when) was this-someone else was going to take care of all that crap. They had the redundant servers, the 99.999 uptime, the expertise, and the resources to store, take care of, and backup your data, to take the tedious chores out of the individual user's responsibility, and let them work and play without worrying about stuff like that, wherever they may roam.
To me, that is the real promise of Google and MobileMe and Mesh and all that. It is obviously just not there yet.
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sachlistens said 1:12PM on 7-26-2008
Yep - Cloud Computing is a little bit too much for them to chew at the moment IMO…
http://tinyurl.com/6ejzvz
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sachlistens said 1:13PM on 7-26-2008
Yep - Cloud Computing is a little bit too much for them to chew at the moment IMO…
http://tinyurl.com/6ejzvz
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