Apple Starting to Restore MobileMe Email Access, Some Email Lost

[MacRumors]

Apple has finally posted an update regarding the extended MobileMe email outage that has affected approximately 1% of users. Their updated support document reports that they have restored web-access to affected MobileMe accounts. This will allow affected users to see emails that they have received since July 18th, the day the outage started.

As a first step toward restoring service, we restored web access to a portion of your MobileMe Mail account at 10:00 p.m. PDT, July 25. You can now log into me.com, and use the Mail web application to access all the messages you have received since the July 18 service outage. You can also compose, send, and receive new messages as normal. Please note that this interim solution does not provide access to any email messages received or saved before the outage began on July 18.

As Apple details, users still do not have access to emails prior to that date and are unable to access their email from their desktop email clients.

Apple warns that users should not make changes to their MobileMe password, email aliases, or storage allocation while this temporary solution is in place. Doing so could result in technical errors.

Apple also admits that while the majority of email messages will be fully restored, approximately 10% of messages received between 5:00 a.m. PDT on July 16th and 10:20 a.m. PDT on July 18th have been lost. Additional details can be found in their tech note.

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[ebony]

They state email maybe be lost from July 16th. I've lost all email from the last 18 months, my @mac.com email has started to work though after 5 days !!

[ziggyonice]

Apple's "Official" MobileMe blog...

From the site:

Steve Jobs has asked me to write a posting every other day or so to let everyone know what’s happening with MobileMe, and I’m working directly with the MobileMe group to ensure that we keep you really up to date. In the 14 days since we launched, it’s been a rocky road and we know the pain some people have been suffering.

[exabytes18]

This is quite the blunder. Great job Apple, great job.

[Pooshka]

When TF will we get the File Sharing feature???

Where TF is the revamped Public folder???

[dissdnt]

1% ain't bad hehe.

[patricksan]

I just wonder when will be released a shared Calendar between Family Package.

Patrick

[Andrmgic]

Yes, but not having complete backups of everyone's e-mail messages for restoration in the event of a server failure is inexcusable.

Apple should be held accountable for the data loss that its customers have experienced as a result of using MobileMe.

[jennyp]

Is this, er.. data loss? Not the best thing for the launch of an email service

[arn]

Originally Posted by ebony

They state email maybe be lost from July 16th. I've lost all email from the last 18 months, my @mac.com email has started to work though after 5 days !!

Your old email will be restored. The web mail access from July 18 on is a temporary solution so people can get some of their recent emails.

arn

[kjs862]

For some reason i feel its greater the 1%

[queshy]

I definitely will not be switching my Gmail over to me.com...

[Silentwave]

Well, I'm glad that they're realizing they have to be held accountable here, and have to keep the customer updated. Also glad that Steve is keeping an eye on the situation, and mandating this openness. I think he'll try and make sure stuff like this doesn't happen again. Apple, thankfully, learns from mistakes.

[a1016neo]

Arn, don't you sleep anymore???

[a1016neo]

It looks like Steve is unhappy with Mobile Me when he tells his employees to post updates everyday...

It is nice that Apple cares about Mobile ME customers

[fleshman03]

I'm not sure how many gamers there are here or how many people in the mac forums run an xbox 360, but here goes.

I really have to say that this reminds me of the great Xbox Live outage of Christmas 07, right down the the blogs and freebies.

Come on Apple, we expect that from the Borg, but not you.

[Lgreer]

I will never pay Apple's exorbitant prices for this service. Especially when all I had ever heard about .Mac is that it was slow and unreliable, and now this debacle with MobileMe.

Why doesn't Apple drastically lower the price and/or offer a free version? It seems like they should offer a "free" version with the iPhone especially.

Silly Apple.

[OS X Dude]

Originally Posted by fleshman03

I'm not sure how many gamers there are here or how many people in the mac forums run an xbox 360, but here goes.

I really have to say that this reminds me of the great Xbox Live outage of Christmas 07, right down the the blogs and freebies.

Come on Apple, we expect that from the Borg, but not you.

What was that all about then? In the UK, Live worked seamlessly (I joined last christmas to Live too).

[Niiro13]

Even a working Mobile Me user, I've noticed that something's being done...cause now, scrolling through the email list doesn't lag like it used to. (just like they did that for the preview pane).

[babyj]

The only time that losing data would be even slightly acceptable is with a major failure at their data centre (flooding, fire, act of god etc) that was out of their control and is always hard to protect against - especially for a service like Mobile Me (low cost web hosting).

This isn't what happened though and to lose data after what appears to be a single server failure just isn't acceptable. It looks like it was only recent emails that were lost and you'd expect there to be some kind of protection against this scenario - maybe keeping a separate backup of all new emails for a week or so until they were covered by another scheduled backup.

I can talk with some authority as I used to be a storage analyst at some large financial institutions and this sort of thing was part of my remit. If this had happened on my watch I'd be expecting a pretty major ticking off at minimum, possibly more. It just shouldn't happen, period.

Still, on a positive note anyone who accessed their email from their phone or computer during the affected period is likely to have at least some of the emails stored elsewhere. Which in theory will mean that once all the devices are synced again most emails will be recovered. In fact, if push was working properly (doubtful I guess) then it might even mean no data loss for a lot of users.

On an even more positive note, I reckon that everyone affected by this is looking at a minimum of a one year subscription for free and possibly more if they kick up a stick. I'd imagine Apple will be very generous though as this has made them look really, really stupid to say the least.

Asking users not to do certain things with their account isn't very good either. How much effort would it take them to stop users from being able to do those things which could cause further problems? Just makes a bad situation worse.

[messedkid]

They have people working on it 24/7 eh?

Somehow I doubt that..


But anyway, at least they ARE working on fixing it.

Agreed something this buggy should have never been released in the first place until at least a majority of said bugs have been resolved, but thats life.

Not everything is going to be all hunky-dory in life...might as well get used to it.

Originally Posted by kjs862

For some reason i feel its greater the 1%

Possible, but not much greater.
The main reason, I assume, you think that is of all the threads started in the last 2 weeks about mobileme not working for the OPs. Well, the only reason people would make said threads, is if they do in fact have a problem. Everyone else (~99%) is enjoying their mobileme service and has no need to post anything bad about it. So it just SEEMS to be alot more people having a problem, since everyone who is talking/posting about it..has something bad to say.

Makes sense, no? I do agree that 1% sounds a little small. 1.65% sounds more reasonable.

[timon]

I'm waiting for Google to offer push features for the iPhone along with the mac and pc. There is nothing to stop them, all they have to do is emulate exchange protocol which has already been done with other e-mail packages.

[revs]

Well at least I now know where that emails I was supposed to receive on the 16th went. And to think i thought the person who sent it was lying to me!

[Striderdm1]

i still cannot get iWeb to update my site properly. The blogs just don't work :-(
But, for me, everything else seems fine. (phew!)

Strider

[8CoreWhore]

Akamai is running the show. zzzzzzzzzzzz