Update: Both MobileMe and Gmail seem to be back up and running. (I had to force quit Mail.app and restart it to get it functional again). Was this a DDoS attack? Brown-out in San Fran? Downtime while some changes to prevent DNS cache injection were made? The intertubes are on fire with rumors. Feel free to make up your own!

Yup, Apple’s on-again, off-again MobileMe service is currently off-again, at least as far as email is concerned. Poorly planned? Ill-conceived? Just plain cursed? Probably none of the above, but it sure can’t catch a break from the breakdowns, now can it?

Your MobileMe Mail is currently unavailable. We apologize for this service interruption and are working hard to resolve the problem. For more information, please refer to System Status on the MobileMe Support Page.

Et tu, blogger David G? Still MIA? (Or when you said later in the week you just didn’t mean that particular week? Le sigh.)

Meanwhile, Daring Fireball presents a very interesting comparison between the recently leaked memoranda of the two Steves, Jobs on MobileMe and Ballmer on Microsoft’s future. As a footnote, Gruber reveals the following:

Those Apple employees who are fortunate enough to work on the MobileMe team were treated to something extra: a 40-minute lecture from Jobs in Apple’s Town Hall theater, which lecture was, shall we say, slightly more profane. E.g. where the memo says “we will press on to make it a service we are all proud of by the end of this year”, in Jobs’s Town Hall address to the MobileMe team, it came out more like “You better [redacted] fix it by the end of the year”. Paraphrasing, but you get the picture.

I do! Let’s hope they did, can, and will.

(Though in all fairness, I should reveal that my primary account, Gmail IMAP has been positively frustrating for me for the last few weeks — far more than MobileMe (since I was not a 1%). Multiple certificate errors, time-outs, etc. to the point where “unable to contact imap.gmail.com” is becoming my “you’ve got mail!” — is IMAP really that hard, or are the megacorps taking us out for a little messaging ride?)