In the continuing saga of the launch that's more and more like a sputter (though hopefully not a full crash and burn, right Apple?), MobileMe is reporting:
1% of MobileMe members cannot access MobileMe Mail. We apologize for any inconvenience.
TUAW is saying that the problem might be (or getting ready to become), larger?
Personally, I'm having NO PROBLEMS whatsoever. Email, fine. Push, fine. Web access, fine.
How about you?
Is the faulty launch making everyone hyperaware and quick to find (and post) problems? Or is MobileMe really cursed by scaling bugs?
Reader comments
Got MobileMe Email Problems?
great site!! You could start many more. I love all the info provided. I will stay tuned.
I like the Aztec and QR codes. Very cool. Ads a bit of style to boring old barcodes. Dont know whats going to happen with people who have old barcode tattoos though. haha
I've read that some suspicion Ms. Perry is about to "reinvent" her image. Holy Cow!! I have seen the complete lyrics for this song and now that I have listened to the clip I can confidently say she will NOT change her "naughty but nice" image with this one.
How can I talk to a live person. Can you send me a #.
My issue is that I need another e-mail address for family member. In trying to get one it took all info and credit card stuff but the e-mail address does not work. I know it is something I did or did not do. Please help....
Initially Mobile me mail was fine, just very slow to launch. Now it will not even load on my mac. I can only access the email from my I phone
how do I stop the the annoying pop saying mobileme expired. It did not...I cancelled it next day. It ate my email from my Imac. STOP THE POP_UP saying you expired
My email password keeps vanishing off my iPhone and will not always autheticate when I put it back in. Anyone else have this problem?
Hi, I cant understand how to add your site in my rss reader. How can I do this?
Having problems with mobile me mail, was working fine but suddenly gone strange. Mail gets sent or pushed to my iphone but when i go to the inbox to click on the mail and read it i cant click on it or do anything with it, not even delete it.
any ideas?
I have an iPhone. Within the past two weeks my mail application has been acting up. When I manually check my email, the email will go into my inbox. As that process happens occasionally two emails will get combined into one. I get the senders email address but the body of the email is from another sender. For instance, I get an email from a buddy. When I open it the body of the email is most usually an advertisement from Apple website. When I check my webmail, everything is normal. Does anyone else have this happen to them?
Thank you for your time,
Erik
Addresses are not available as they are on my home G5. I can't always call up the Address Book when I'm using .me over the Internet. It's very slow to hunt for e-mail addresses to then copy and paste into the address box. Not a happy camper.
Hey Lyrinda, I experienced the same problem from the first day I use mobile me, which is 2 days before, and I never get my contacts loaded during email composing, so I have to copy and paste email address from the Contacts every time, that's suck. I have chatted with the apple support team twice but they couldn't fix it.
My e-mail on my home G5 iMac works fine. I do not have an iPhone. I've had .mac since the beginning and it worked fine - until it changed over to MobileMe. Trying to use my .mac (now MobileMe) over the Internet has been a disaster. Composed messages ready-to-send just disappear - and not into drafts. On the other hand, messages listed as "Sent" are also found in "Drafts" so I have no confidence as to whether they have been sent and received. It is also excruciatingly slow. I frequently see a mostly blank screen - just the outline of the ,me window, but no content. I can't trust it. I've taken to composing messages on Word or on my office e-mail and then pasting them into .me so I can recover them if they disappear from .me (.mac).
Absolute crap but want it desperately to work as is such a great idea in theory. Hanging on in there but getting very fed up....at some point will abandon ship and go back to outlook....
ok i left gmail for this trial. im a pc user but im trying to convince myself to switch to apple. this is so frustrating and my gmail worked fine. i liked the calender and the idea of the photo gallery. instead of using picassa and itunes. google has a leg up on apple. think about it. its a free service. it will sync to your phone and outlook. if you use itunes your calender and contacts sync. my problem is with the calender and the speed of mobile me. oh and i cant use ie6 either. im still trying to decide if im going to pay for this service. can anyone please tell me what they think. i love my iphone and i love the concept. but i dont want to pay for something that doesnt work.
also is the "cloud" the same thing as "cloud computing" that is trademarked by dell??
By the way is it possible to sync iCal with the usb lead if you turn off push. I managed to sync contacts but the Calender option didn't appear in the iTunes tab...
Cloud has wiped all 4500 of the emails I had. I was trying to upgrade my wife's account (what a joke!) so she could sync her iCal on her iPhone to her MacBook. It wouldn't allow me to do it then it wiped all the emails from the server which then linked via Push to my Mac Book Pro and lifted them off my computer. Cheers Apple! Can't get through to customer support. I can't send mail but can receive it. Was on to the 'dedicated chat for the 1%' of which I thought I was one' and the operator cut me off. Twice. Am waiting to hear from the support team with bated breath. Agghh. going green, must have air, muuussst hhhaaaave aaaiiiiiiirrrrrrrrrrr. Agh
Mail works just fine. But cannot get calendar or contacts to even load.
mobile me is confused. When not confused it is so slow to update iCal and iPhone (and vice-versa) that I want to scream. It is taking 3 hours to update!!! That is with push turned ON and 15 min. Selected after it. Not even close to expectations.
I've also been a .mac customer for years. Now, mail is very, very slow. Contacts take quite a while to load up. Formatting is often 'off', so that the mail doesn't line up, making it difficult to identify new mail.
Bad job running this out before it was fully tested. I can't stand the idea of switching, but this is taking a long time- what if the bugs remain??
I did have problems , everything worked but mail, but this is how i fixed it, myself!
Web mail, didnt work at all. SO I set up outlook to sync with mobileme, it showed the folders and I could send, not recieve. Still nothing on the web. Cleared out my cookies and everything cache and then went to me.com and mail worked, I could see folders, etc, and then after a while send and recieve started working!
this is nothing less than presposterous. i thank my lucky stars i went with my guts and kept with HyperOffice . a much better service feature set wise, and obviously more dependable too!
6 days and counting. Ina few hours it will be a week I have been without my primary email account.
Still no updates.
I am in disgust.
Apple doesn't support mobile me aliases from the iphone in iphone's mail or safari...
Right now mail is up to 3 hours delayed... ha!
Delay is back this morning. Taking 10-30 minutes again for a mail to come in. This is easily noticeable by comparing received time to sent time.
I just did a test to both my @me.com and @mac.com and my thinking from yesterday seems correct. The @mac.com mail came in 2 minutes (which is still way too slow) and I have yet to receive the @me.com mail now going on 10 minutes.
They cannot handle the load and really need to beef up their SMTP servers.
ok, now i cannot access my other non apple email account from my macbookpro or iphone. This is getting seriously weird.
As a software developer, I'm pretty forgiving to these sorts of situations. Writing bug-free code is near impossible. But it is Apple's silence on the matter that is puzzling. This issue is clouding (pun intended) the whole iPhone release for me. Everyone I talk to is having problems, so it is not confined to just 1%. A simple acknowledgement will go a long way.
Dyvim -- do you see my reply above regarding MobileMe not working with Outlook 2007 connected to Exchange?
No email whatsoever since Friday...5 days and counting...what the heck is going on? Don't know...Apple won't say. Wow.
My email was out between roughly midnight last night and 6 am this morning.
Also, a Calendar event added on my iPhone, while it did sync up to the "cloud" (me.com), refuses to sync to Outlook 2007 on my PC. The sync works in the opposite direction (events added in Outlook on my PC show up on my iPhone).
Logged on this morning to a 5th day without email. Still no response from support and no update from Apple when mail will be up and running for us 1% affected. Not the way to run a business or to treat customers.
Turned on my iPhone at 5:00 this morning, no mail. At 6:05 AM, as I was driving to work, it delivered all messages. Now at work, when I was getting "invalid password" earlier on Mail.app, it is working fine.
Perhaps Apple has found the culprit in their cloud, and is now able to repair everyone? I hope so for Tim's sake. I couldn't imagine losing a year's worth of email.
Ive been on dot mac since the beginning. Everything was working fine untill they switched to this child sounding "cloud" mobile me system. I have not had email since friday and I am prepping 4 commercial shoots. Like everyone else, no acknowledgment from apple and their website support bounces me around with no way to register a complaint. They must be in real trouble to deny customer service. I'm now on my own network and have given as many contacts as possible my new address. The real drag is the mobile me rain cloud has wiped out over a year of emails that i frequently referenced. will i ever see those again? Apple's not talking.
Been fine until 5:00 AM this morning, when we encountered "invalid password" on Mail.app, the same on our iPhone. Wen to www.me.com, which accepted the same password, and returned the blank grey screen. Looks like that 1% is growing . . .
I've just come across the following post which explains why I've had sync'ing issues with MobileMe and Outlook:
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1619249&tstart=15
Note the quote from the Apple support guy:
"I understand that you would like to sync MobileMe with OUtlook, this is possible but Outlook cannot be already configured to an Exchange server"
This is a shame since I would have liked my Outlook contacts to be available as MobileMe contacts. The only way I've got it to work is to export contacts from Outlook to a CSV file and then import that CSV file to Windows Contacts. MobileMe sems to sync okay with Windows Contacts.
Today the MobileMe IMAP server (mail.me.com) has stopped responding. Things seems to be going from bad to worse.
I have not had email since Friday morning and today I went to the Apple Store in Nashville to find out what the issue was. The people at the store seemed to not know about the email issue or were told not to let on that it was a major issue. While at the store they did try to assist me and were able to get on Chat Support. I left my message with support at 16:00 and have not received any response yet on my hotmail account. Completely unacceptable. Microsoft is going to have a field day with this, I can see the ads already.
Well,
I got my Iphone today, signed up for mobile me and got all of one email pushed to the phone. The web site is running fine receiving email...but not phone. Ugh.
Dr.C
I have not been able to see my email online since Friday. So, this is day four. I waited an hour yesterday to "live chat" with a Mobile Me rep. He said he had yet not come across other customers with the same problem. He also said a tech rep would be contacting me within 24 hours. Didn't happen. Contacts and Calendar are sluggish but working. I can get to my email from my home computer, just not on the web.
The 10-30 minute delay subsided after all morning and a majority of the afternoon. Now I am back to speedy e-mail delivery and can close gmail.
This has happened in the past with .Mac. I'm guessing a few of their SMTP servers get behind due to load or they lose one or two.
Unfortunately I only tested if @me.com was delayed before. It seems they are using separate smtp servers for me.com. Its possible that the @mac.com ones will be more reliable for the short term.
gobo:~ djw$ dig MX me.com
; <<>> DiG 9.4.1-P1 <<>> MX me.com
;; global options: printcmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 10054
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 6, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0
;; QUESTION SECTION:
;me.com. IN MX
;; ANSWER SECTION:
me.com. 2342 IN MX 10 smtp-mx005.me.com.
me.com. 2342 IN MX 10 smtp-mx006.me.com.
me.com. 2342 IN MX 10 smtp-mx001.me.com.
me.com. 2342 IN MX 10 smtp-mx002.me.com.
me.com. 2342 IN MX 10 smtp-mx003.me.com.
me.com. 2342 IN MX 10 smtp-mx004.me.com.
;; Query time: 19 msec
;; SERVER: 10.76.0.1#53(10.76.0.1)
;; WHEN: Mon Jul 21 19:41:26 2008
;; MSG SIZE rcvd: 186
gobo:~ djw$ dig MX me.com
; <<>> DiG 9.4.1-P1 <<>> MX me.com
;; global options: printcmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 10054
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 6, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0
;; QUESTION SECTION:
;me.com. IN MX
;; ANSWER SECTION:
me.com. 2342 IN MX 10 smtp-mx005.me.com.
me.com. 2342 IN MX 10 smtp-mx006.me.com.
me.com. 2342 IN MX 10 smtp-mx001.me.com.
me.com. 2342 IN MX 10 smtp-mx002.me.com.
me.com. 2342 IN MX 10 smtp-mx003.me.com.
me.com. 2342 IN MX 10 smtp-mx004.me.com.
;; Query time: 19 msec
;; SERVER: 10.76.0.1#53(10.76.0.1)
;; WHEN: Mon Jul 21 19:41:26 2008
;; MSG SIZE rcvd: 186
gobo:~ djw$ host smtp-mx1.mac.com
smtp-mx1.mac.com has address 17.148.20.64
gobo:~ djw$ host smtp-mx2.mac.com
smtp-mx2.mac.com has address 17.148.20.65
gobo:~ djw$ host smtp-mx3.mac.com
smtp-mx3.mac.com has address 17.148.20.66
gobo:~ djw$ host smtp-mx4.mac.com
smtp-mx4.mac.com has address 17.148.20.67
gobo:~ djw$ host smtp-mx5.mac.com
smtp-mx5.mac.com has address 17.148.20.68
gobo:~ djw$ host smtp-mx6.mac.com
smtp-mx6.mac.com has address 17.148.20.69
gobo:~ djw$ host smtp-mx001.me.com
smtp-mx001.me.com has address 17.148.20.81
gobo:~ djw$ host smtp-mx002.me.com
smtp-mx002.me.com has address 17.148.20.82
gobo:~ djw$ host smtp-mx003.me.com
smtp-mx003.me.com has address 17.148.20.83
gobo:~ djw$ host smtp-mx004.me.com
smtp-mx004.me.com has address 17.148.20.84
gobo:~ djw$ host smtp-mx005.me.com
smtp-mx005.me.com has address 17.148.20.85
gobo:~ djw$ host smtp-mx006.me.com
smtp-mx006.me.com has address 17.148.20.86
I've been without email since Thursday and was told by an excited
Apple Store 'helper' on Regent Street, Central London this morning
that he hadn't come across a 1%-er before me as though I was some
sort of rare insect he'd found crawling round the Apple toilet bowl.
With that he hurriedly swatted me away when he realised that there
was nothing he could do to lighten my mood about the failure of
MobileMe to provide me with a basic email service. "I have no idea,"
he said looking over my shoulder at a younger and prettier ladybird.
I was hoping that this migration over to MobileMe from .Mac would be
the answer to my prayers as a start-up company that relies on making
sure details changed on the road are there waiting for me when I
return home to base at night.
Temporarily, I've jumped onto an old mail.com email account that of
course works perfectly. It make me wonder why I bothered to get
excited in the first place.
This is not a rare story of course. Having read this article and
numerous postings from the US, it's clear that Apple's PR machinery
has ground to a halt too. By giving us no information in relation to
the status of the problem for 4 days, it reeks of the corporation's
amateurish approach to after-sales support.
"You can only get responses online," mumbled another worker bee on
the shop floor. MobileMe has created another slippery high wall for
customers to clamber up when wishing for a human voice to tell you
that, 'yes, it's not working, but we know why and we're fixing it.'
I avoided rushing to O2 to upgrade to an iPhone last week and
struggled to cover up a shit-eating grin of smugness when I read in
the national papers of all the hiccups for those who queued in the
all night rain and wind to hold aloft the thinner, faster handset
like a Tolkien ring.
I guess the Jobs Curse has finally reached me,
poisoning my inbox and leaving me alone and void of hope that my
business can work without the help of Microsoft. Am I wrong Steve?
iPhoneMilk:
Thanks so much...and yes i would be much happier...maybe in an update that will make MobileMe work? :)
Thom- use smtp.gmail.com not imap you don't need imap settings for this configuration.
and would you be happier with mobile me if they had some sort of Homepage,twitter/facebook like thing for all of us?
I know i would!! =)
iPhoneMilk:
I agree the iPhone is magical. I can't speak for anyone but myself but the frustration is MobileMe. I have been a member of .mac for 3 years now and didn't have any problems with it. I didn't mind spending the $99 a year for this. With the introduction of the iPhone 3G, iTunes 7.7 and MobileMe all at the same time, problems have cropped up. It's too bad Apple didn't test all this out and have all the bugs worked out. For me, my account is getting ready to renew again and it makes me made I dont' have the services I have been using and want to use now. It's ridiculous. Apple has said you will get a month free and now possibly two months free? My account still shows it's going to be debited early next month. It makes me furious about that. I guess it's just all the furstration with all the roll out of the new items all at once. I for one think it could have been handled much better and in a more professional manner. But as a full paying member since 2005 I shouldn't have to go through this. I didn't sign up for a free trial. And I'm not saying that those that just did should be going through this...none of us should. So maybe that's why people are saying they are cancelling, they are leaving...who knows...it's just a mess if you ask me.
iPhoneMilk: do you use smtp.gmail.com or imap.gmail.com for the server settings...
I quit mobileme because it was not reliable.
@Gmail settings for using Gmail and MobileMe together- I will post screenshots later on for everyone on the forums.
@Joe- please come back to us.
You know i gotta be honest everytime i hear a horror story, i gotta remind myself that it's just a bad tomatoe. Yes it sucks you went through that. but that isn't everyone's experience as a whole....
the iPhone is magical! come back to us! =)
Joe: You are so right about the wait. And the two questions I have submitted to them I keep getting the same response...It's being sent to a specialist and they will contact you. I'm still waiting
iPhoneMilk...thanks for the tip. I'm going to try that
My mail is completely down, has been for since the 16th. Right now I am chatting with Apple MobileMe support. Let me tell you, when they say half-hour wait, they mean half hour wait... then 20 minutes of stupid questions to "verify your identity" that could be done in 30 seconds over the phone. After explaining that I believed Apple had committed a fundamental breach of the contract I entered into as a .Mac member they agreed to refund the amount of membership minus days used, which were very few as I had just renewed.
This is not my first problem with Apple either. As a FORMER iPhone user I have come to expect this from Apple. I have cancelled my subscription to .Mac today and will not get an iPhone 3G... but I still love my MacBook. How long will that last?
@Simon
I actually got the same thing, I noticed that 3 calenders were inside my Outlook and also on my MobileMe calender.
I think it's a matter of choosing the right one. When i get home i will check it out then furthur explain.
Geohunt canada-
Yes there is =) actually funny you ask, i'm doing it right now.
This is what you do, maybe i should write a guide on the forums? i'll do that later but here's a quick Snippet.
First, get into your gmail and Forward all your incomings to your mobileMe.
Then from your iPhone go into your actual MobileMe account and Disable "turn off" your SMTP mobileMe server, and enter a new one, and enter the GMAIL's SMTP server, and put in your username and password.
From your computer if your using outlook or mail.app do the same thing. Change your SMTP to gmail.
This way on your iphone you will receive email and sync with mobileMe, however when you reply it will reply from your gmail. So you can use your mobileme for the push and everything for new messages and still use your gmail address..
I tend to agree with TUAW. I'm having minor problems that are very annoying and all I get from apple is that they are working on the issue. One is when I try to add a field to the Address Card it doesn't add it. Another problem is when I try and change an Alias name that displays it doesn't save it in the settings. Another problem is when trying to do an email I have to type the email address out as it doesn't read it from my contact list. I have tried this both on my PC and my PowerBook G4 using IE7, FireFox and Safari and it just doesn't work. So I dunno...But I do know there are still problems
All is well for me at the moment. The only issue that I see from time to time is when you delete off of the phone or computer the emails tend to stick around on the other device... I'm hoping to over a period of time all the issues get corrected. I didn't expect it to be flawless from the start.
Thanks iPhoneMilk for the reply. I do have the MobileMe settings in Control Panel. All that seemed to do was create empty Calendar folders (Home and Work) in my Calendar. Ditto for Contacts: I just get empty folder with whatever group I created.
I agree that the gallery is fun. It looks so cool. I wanted to geotags at least to be valid since I wanted to add a GeoRSS feed for those photos to display them in Google Maps (something I'd hoped MobileMe would do by default).
Hey, is there a way to make gmail and mobile me cooperate? I'd like to upgrade, but don't want to switch over to a @me address... BUT, I'd also still like to utilize the imap functionality from gmail... is it possible?
No Simon, it auto sizes all photo's I noticed that to. But i am satisfied with the gallery it's fun to use =)
Simon do you have your MobileME client in Control Panel setup?
my contacts are syncing fine, i had to set that up first.
I get sporadic problems with mail, calendar and never get the contacts to work -- and they don't sync with my Outlook contacts.
This is a shame; I really like the idea and think the MobileMe site looks really cool. I'll stick with it though, since I think they'll get there in the end. I paid for mine, so don't have the luxury of waiting 60 days for the trial to complete.
I noticed the following issue: Sending photos to MobileMe gallery causes them to be downsampled to 800x600 and all EXIF data such as the geotag to be stripped away. Have I done something wrong, or are others experiencing the same problem?
For me push is not working ... Dunno if it got anything to do with my pwned 1st gen iPhone ... I'm going to wait and see for a bit until it's official that all MobileMe hickups are cleared and see if it works then.
I think that TUAW may be on to something but may not have made a key connection. If you think about it at the WWDC Jobs spoke about two distinct services Mobile Me and the Push service for Apps. While some iPhone customers may not be using Mobile Me they are going to be downloading Apps to their iPhone and will be in essence be subscribing to the Push feature. Now, what if the two are actually part of the same cloud and both services are growing at the same time? Then you're likely to see delays and service failures as Apple attempts to scale up to the level of demand. This is all a lot of 'what if' and assumes a lot but let's face it Apple has a lot of work on their hands just to keep up with demand of the iPhones let alone the services that accompany the product. My sense is that they'll get there as soon as demand balances out with their ability to execute (scale).
my access is incredibly slow. I had a .mac account for just over a year and access was easy and fast. Now the login screen display is poor (no graphics and the ID and Password fields are partially covered by another set of text) and very slow to access email (and everything else sadly). I am being patient and hoping for the best.
Mine is working great, however i would like to see a lot more features with it... and i would love to see it working for EVERYONE not just a small % of people.
They've got 60 days while i'm in trial mode to fix the issues.... =)
I'm seeing 10-30 minute delays on e-mails coming in. My girlfriend is experiencing the same thing.
Checked Apple Mail, iphone, and me.com. All have the same delay.
Mail is down for me :-)
Calendar and contacts are acting funky too, not all changes are syncing.
One of the main reasons I was excited about the Mobile Me trial was for the use of the iDisk, and having a public folder to collaborate on projects with....Now, they say I can't allow others to access my public folder...lame
Also the compose new message window won't let me access my contacts, so I can't send groups messages which I do very often in gmail....
And where is the standard HTML formatting tool bar? Bold, italic, center, justify, bullet points? This thing needs to have all the functionality of g-mail or you end up really sacrificing a lot of productivity (and $99 a year) to get the "push" and a web gallery..
I want Mobile Me to work so bad the way they described it...please Apple don't frak around with features and make this thing work like we expect!