Apple Starting to Restore MobileMe Email Access, Some Email Lost

[satcomer]

The one thing is Apple is losing the "perception" of doing no wrong. With thie iPhone 2.0 opening day server crash & poor supply=lost sales along with this "Mobile Mess" the perception Apple is now gone in my opinion. Just look at all the bad press on this Mobile Mess and the halo affect will hurt future possible switchers who bought an iPhone 2.0.

Apple has really messed up and nothing they can do will fix it in this depressed economy. Never discount "perception" on a business.

 

[Daveoc64]

Server downtime happens. Anybody remember Amazon's $100 Xbox deal to the first 1000 people or something. Amazon.com, the biggest online retailer, blew up with all the server hits it got. But nobody cries about that anymore. Xbox Live supposedly blew up for some people over Christmas (though I never noticed any problems), but nobody cries about that anymore either

Last time I checked, Amazon.com is not a subscription service. Nor did it go down for two weeks They also didn't lose 10% of people's orders.

Xbox LIVE went down intermittently for less than two weeks, but they didn't lose people's data either. They also offered a free game to make up for the downtime.

People who pay for a service have the right to complain, you can't take that away.

 

[PinkyMacGodess]

Ummmm...

Ma'am, there is no Service Pack 2 - not surprising that you can't find it.

Yeah, sorry. I was thinking about server 2003 when I wrote that.

Still, Balmer's comments are funny, in a way. Can Microstuff afford to dump Vista? I don't know how far it's penetrated the market but it might be cheaper to ditch or do a complete rewrite than to stick it through and ride that dying horse any farther... Still, it's funny that I had issue with Fusion and Vista with Office 2007. Then I thought who would want to do that anyway. Isn't that the definition of a virus??? Self inflicted too...

 

[megfilmworks]

The one thing is Apple is losing the "perception" of doing no wrong. With thie iPhone 2.0 opening day server crash & poor supply=lost sales along with this "Mobile Mess" the perception Apple is now gone in my opinion. Just look at all the bad press on this Mobile Mess and the halo affect will hurt future possible switchers who bought an iPhone 2.0.

Apple has really messed up and nothing they can do will fix it in this depressed economy. Never discount "perception" on a business.

You need perspective. The vast majority of people don't know or don't care.
Apple has been brilliant in their R+D and marketing.
They have forever changed the paradigm of cellphones and smartphones for the better.
Give me leading edge with flaws any day, instead of boring and old with fewer flaws. (or more flaws in the case of BBE, Palm Moto, etc.)

 

[winterspan]

Data loss is never acceptable, but we are not talking about a long established service losing data because it didn't have proper backups, we are talking about the launch of a new, very complex service and a transition of old data to the new platform. And email "data loss" is obviously much less critical than really any other sort since all the data should be able to be resent. Although I guess if you have an "email alert" system setup for something important, a 10-day outage wouldn't be a whole lot of fun.

I understand that MobileMe is not a free service, and that everyone is a paying customer, but people new to the MobileMe/dotMac service don't have a lot of room to bitch if they were relying on this service for critical business. You'd have to be CRAZY to rely on a freshly launched, highly complex, untested consumer service for important business email! That would be akin to haphazardly upgrading your only critical production web server to an unreleased alpha version of a future service pack found on a torrent site!

Although, even though I'd highly advise against running critical business email on a consumer email service like .Mac (or GMail for that matter), The *existing* customers of .Mac email that were forced onto this new platform and lost their email access as a result do have a completely legitimate reason to be pissed off - especially since it is a pre-existing for-profit service.

 

[megfilmworks]

I agree. I can't tell you how many times AOL lost my address book or mail stored on their servers.
If you don't back up your email, then you are not in business.
If you rely on email as your only tool for communication with clients and staff, then you are a fool.

 

[MacCheetah3]

Hi

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

It was quite frustrating. That ( amount of new users ) was the biggest part of the problem. The connections and servers were overwhelmed. Kind of like this MobileMe fiasco. Not only were some gamers simply unable to connect, games performed poorly and even improperly. I remember a lot of Halo 3 games that simply didn't exist ( data was never recorded or recorded properly ). Since the XBOX 360 Dashboard is tied to Live, it even resulted in extreme hassle just logging onto your 360, massive amount of lag just trying to display your profile because it was waiting for the data to be retrieved.

Anywho...A few things come to mind.

• My brother upgraded his computer right before the MobileMe transition and I sold him my HDD and decided to upgrade my own. Well...I had to reinstall than, of course. Bad timing. Time Machine is a great idea and I use all the time. Things didn't go quite as smoothly for that. While all my other data was restored with little effort, my email went crazy. I thought all email was stored locally. Maybe I shouldn't have been connected to the Internet during the restoration process. It took probably 24 hours for me to totally get my email back to 'snuff'. Why? Mainly because of the overwhelmed MobileMe servers making them unusably slow. Mail ( the client ) wanting to sync and cache everything was the true problem. What disturbed me more than the time frame was the fact that my Inbox count went down ~60. Wha'!..I thought to myself. I'm an email packrat in a bad sort of way. I keep emails that I get with software serials, ... So...While not completely the end of the world, it would make for some large headaches. This aggravated more simply because I was using Time Machine ( local backups ) and so even if Apple lost all my emails, I should technically be OK. While I never did figure it out, as far as I can tell thus far, I haven't lost anything important.

• Unusably slow is still my description of the first few days of MobileMe, especially the Webapp part of it. Another thing, and I haven't tried it lately was I couldn't get the Webapp iDisk upload feature to work using Firefox and Vista. I couldn't choose the file. I navigated to it but pressing the Choose button or whatever they call it did absolutely nothing.

• Email loss? H-h-h-m-m-m... I would have to guess that Apple would have backups and even redundant backups of such a thing. So, how would this happen? The only thing that comes to mind is that the email servers accepted email delivered but corrupted it or simply lost it (?) before it was able to be backed up. Three thoughts come to mind. 1) If they are using Mac OS X Server and Xserves, it makes those products look pretty bad 2) If they aren't using Apple products, why not, as you'd hope that Apple would be using what they'd see best and hopefully it would be their own products. 3) Administrator(s) "oopsy" in which Apple still looks like terrible for choosing such.

 

[MacCheetah3]

Hi

Btw, is it just me, or has anyone else noticed the "I'm a mac and I'm a pc" ads have disappeared? Not seeing them on CNet, CNN, tv etc. Not sure if it just me not being on at the right time or something, but the ads seemed to have been pulled.​

And I've seen 'Mac' in more movies and stuff lately. Contract over?

I read that Microstuff was taking it somewhat personal at some level, the slams on Vista. Balmer even is quoted as saying that 'not everything went as well as it should have' (DUH!) but that 'they were committed to getting it working better and especially for the future version of Windoze'.

Uh huh...

Microsoft's 'public beta' policy was a little too close to 'public alpha'.

I've got Vista and it runs like a dog and I've had so many issues with it. Like the latest is that it won't update, at all... No service pack 2, no nothing... Even under administrator... Niiiice...

You do realize that Justin Long or "Mac" does have a full fledged filming career right? I haven't seen the ads lately either but Apple has never really been a full 'regular' TV spot kind of company. Heck, you don't exactly see a lot of Microsoft commercials outside of XBOX 360 and XBOX Live ( games, ... ).

After some frustration ( partially caused by Apple and their specific hardware - drivers ) to get Vista 64-bit ( x64 ) running on my MacBook, suddenly I have BSoDs. Nothing changed, nothing quirky, no viruses. For some reason however my BFE ( Base Filtering Engine service - deals with the firewall and overall network protection ) has decided to go crazy and cause headaches. I use it for business so I just disabled it for now but who knows what else might spontaneously happen or if I'll ever fix that service. Not to mention the time I took to narrow it down. Apple is by no means perfect, see this thread but fortunately or unfortunately usually problems with Apple products are large ( hardware failures in Macs, ... ) which happens on 'PCs' and isn't exactly avoidable no matter what any manufacturer does to prevent / alert users of them. Typically, from what I've seen, it isn't so much of the access denied, can't open applications, ... Some is, of course, but a lot of that can also be fingered at the user.

 

[MacCheetah3]

Hi

For all the complainers crying about class-action suit whatever, I'm sure Apple makes no guarantees about data loss (didn't read the EULA did you?). Things happen, and sometimes you have to deal with them. I just had to re-paste my GPU because it started acting up, but I didn't cry about.

I can tell you first hand from an Apple-esque side of things this isn't pretty no matter what way you cut it. No one makes promises of data. Why? Two reasons come to mind instantly. 1) If it is that important to you, you'd be stupid not to make sure it is safe. It'd be like leaving your front door unlocked. It isn't too likely for someone just to randomly check to see, walk in, and steal everything but that doesn't mean it could happen. Heck, it can happen if the door is locked. I wish I could say all but I know there are some that get the backup hint when this kind of thing strikes, especially those using their computers for business. 2) **** happens and isn't necessarily anything you did to cause it. I have plenty of people bring in their computers because they won't boot due to BSoDs, missing system files, blank ( black ) screens and behold a HDD failure. While I can attempt to retrieve ( recover ) any data, what more can I do? I've also had a couple PSUs go out while I've been working on them. It's not like I hope for that. Some think so because it is a higher bill for them and they see it as a way for me to try and get more $$$ but it's truly just a bigger hassle for me. The only things I can tell them is 1) they can spend $xxx to try and recover it by a professional who uses clean-rooms and such 2) make sure to have recent backups next time 3) this would have happened to you in so and so time frame or if you would have unplugged and replugged your machine from the outlet but because you brought it in for the beginning symptoms of problems, it happened while in my possession without any fault of my own. So, I had to put that sort of disclaimer on the service tag they sign when submitting the unit.

P.S. I did have a HDD failure one time during my APP warranty period on my Ti with no backup system in place. Lost everything. Wasn't too happy and was angry with myself. Fortunately, most was reconstructable after numerous hours of work. I didn't keep anything "mission critical" at that point. I do to an extent now but nothing that would completely put me "under the bus" if lost. While not exactly perfect, that's why I cheered for Time Machine.

 

[daneoni]

And I find this thread has two kind of users as well, but in a different tact:

1. Users who have the arrogance and gall to say the following:

- You shouldn't have depended on .Mac/MobileMe for your e-mail
- B*tch about the "whiners"
- Still believes that Apple/Steve Jobs is god and cannot do any wrong and views the "whiners" as complaining about nothing.


2. Users who have been affected and RIGHTLY SHOULD BE COMPLAINING.

All those complaining about the "whiners" I say this:

GET A LIFE.

If YOU were affected, you would be complaining just as much as these so-called "whiners."

FREE e-mail services such as MSN Live, Gmail, Yahoo, etc. have had outages before but *NOT* for two WEEKS. Think about that for a second. TWO WEEKS. So those who have been affected shouldn't "whine?" Then what the h*ll should they do? Just sit on their hands and just whistle dixie?

Move away from the pipe and quit worshiping your so-called "god" called Apple.

w00master

Amen

 

[MacCheetah3]

Hi

Funny how some people will pay for an email service as unreliable as Mobile Me, yet others will use much more reliable free alternatives like Gmail. Even though the features aren't the same, I am glad I didn't renew my .Mac account.

I'm truly not trying to be rude about this though this is simply an unhelpful statement and actually a generalized personal attack. It's the same as someone telling everyone they converse with that those who purchase(d) a Ford automobile are stupid just because you had a bad experience with Ford and now like Audi. Opinions are fine and I do feel those affected do have a right to voice their displeasure but I also agree that these sorts of mobs go about it a little too strongly, a bit unprofessional and impolite, and maybe even a bit too quickly. It usually seems like 75% or more are affected by a given problem and that's what they are going for but it does become whining and nonconstructive. Ever see the film Office Space? Well...It is quite the same. Peter has more than a handful of bosses come by and politely grill ( that doesn't sound right, kind of contradictory ) him about a mistake he made. After the first boss informs him, the picture is pretty well painted, even though Peter already realized the mistake he made all by himself, and the rest of them are just making things worse for everybody. Reasserting the point about not making the same mistake again but a bit far. In my work, it's those people that call three times a day asking if their computer is finished. Well...1) I said I'd contact you when it was 2) I'm working on it and talking to you is using up time that I could be still working on it. Finally...I'd like to point that most of these "whiners" seem to only make a 'stink' when they get the most publicity. There could have been problems before but since there's tons of media now, most who didn't complain before come 'out of the woodwork' crying and yelling. Again...Nonproductive and rude.

 

[MacCheetah3]

Hi

And yet, despite all that, I will *never* trust Apple with my data after this.

I just want you to clarify something. Do you mean that you won't trust any product from Apple to have your data reside on it or do you mean just online? I ask because if it is the former and you are ... careless(?) ... enough to not have backups or even redundant backups of any data that you feel is truly important and irreplaceable to you, than there isn't much more I can say. I've seen plenty have at least a tiny moment of clarity to finally have duplicates ( backups ) of any important data after losing some. If you fall down a manhole walking down a street in daylight, is that the city's fault? Not likely my friend.

 

[MacCheetah3]

Hi

On a separate note, Can you see SJ pulling all these MobileMe people into a room, pounding his fist on the table and saying "Call your families, NO ONE goes home until this is fixed! Make this right and fast!" Then after glaring at them, turns on his heel and storms out of the room.

I can totally see this.

Coachingguy

That made me think of the scene in the film Pirates of Silicon Valley where Steve ( played by Noah Wyle ) freaks out on Bill ( played by Anthony Michael Hall ) about stealing the Macintosh OS.

 

[Veri]

duplicate

 

[Veri]

That's my two cents as someone who deals with this issue every day, and has been through the process of madly trying to recover thousands of mailboxes after realizing that the backups weren't working precisely as designed.

Apple should be able to put a bullet through any single random server or set fire to any (unmanned!) building and have no more than a few minutes (DNS TTL) partial downtime. No account should be tied to a particular anything.

This does not require insane money providing you hire sufficient talent to bolt together various open source solutions rather than outsourcing to some software/server/hosting combination like, say, uh, Sun + Akamai which gives you a heap of promises and days of downtime when things go wrong. Thanks to defensive coding and administration, I've never been in a situation where I've had to spend days recovering data in my charge, and this applies whether a tuple represents e.g. a message to a casual forum, a purchase averaging $50-100/shot at an online store, or accounting data where one tuple might summarise $1E6s of work.

To take the simplest first case of the forum, my learning experience (=> not ideal, but it worked with 0 downtime), I ran mod_perl+Apache+MySQL on two geographically distant servers and DNS round-robined them. To summarise, every database update was recorded in a timestamped plaintext representation, submitted to a process which would send these representations in-order to the other server a.s.a.p.; the other server would read in and process to sync. Concurrency issues were trivial, as I was only dealing with one table - different primary key namespace for each server for creation, and for modification each component (set) that could be separately updated would have a timestamp associated with it, so earlier never overwrote later. Suspiciously similar to mail .

The plaintexts were batched for local archiving at a third site (locally), and I would automatically check that I could reconstruct the whole live database from them, starting at arbitrary points. Yes, the database would have been 1/n'th Apple's MobileMe database, n>>10, but I'm sure my budget was <<1/n'th! And storage is so so cheap that if 1 million users were to average 500MB of mail, we'd be talking about ~$50,000 per db copy.

 

[satcomer]

You need perspective. The vast majority of people don't know or don't care.
Apple has been brilliant in their R+D and marketing.
They have forever changed the paradigm of cellphones and smartphones for the better.
Give me leading edge with flaws any day, instead of boring and old with fewer flaws. (or more flaws in the case of BBE, Palm Moto, etc.)

You need to calm down. I was talking from the marketing view. You seem to not have read Walt Mossberg's Apple's MobileMe far too Flawed to be Reliable and David Pogue's Apple's MobileMess. These two are Apple's two biggest cheerleaders blasting Apple's problems. The do nothing wrong Apple (in some MacRumors eyes) perception is going down fast and it will hurt future sales! The honeymoon Apple has enjoyed the past few years seems to be over.

 

[Diaresi]

MobileMe - brought to you by the only major company to take it's whole online store down to add new products!

 

[robbyx]

What troubles me about the MobileMe fiasco, both as a long-time customer and shareholder, is how woefully unprepared Apple seems to have been for this launch. I wonder if this is the first chink in the armor. Apple has been on a roll since NeXT took over and I wonder if they're a bit full of themselves these days. The fact that it is taking SO long to get things working is very troublesome. And the fact that their servers couldn't handle the load isn't exactly an advertisement for OS X Server's ability to scale.

I think it's a much bigger mess than they're admitting and it really bums me out to see Apple, always a stickler for quality, release such an untested product. Bottom line, Apple rushed all this stuff to market. iPhone 2.0 software is slow and buggy (I can't stand how bad the key lag is in SMS) and MobileMe obviously wasn't close to being ready.

And I don't think a bizarrely worded, anonymous "status" update makes up for the headaches...two weeks later. Apple's cult of secrecy and inability to communicate with customers is getting ridiculous. Steve is definitely a visionary, but drop the paranoia already. You run a company with millions of customers who pay a premium. We don't deserve to have half-baked products foisted upon us (especially when the product being upgraded actually worked!) and we certainly don't deserve to be kept in the dark.

 

[DipDog3]

I think that I am going to wait till Apple gets everything straightened out before I get MobileMe. Maybe I will wait for the next version.

 

[robbyx]

You need perspective. The vast majority of people don't know or don't care.
Apple has been brilliant in their R+D and marketing.
They have forever changed the paradigm of cellphones and smartphones for the better.
Give me leading edge with flaws any day, instead of boring and old with fewer flaws. (or more flaws in the case of BBE, Palm Moto, etc.)

Well, as the official Mac/Apple guru among my friends and family, I've had several people express interest in the iPhone, but wonder if it's "too buggy" and all have said they are worried about MobileMe.

So, I *DO* think the word is out...

 

[robbyx]

Apple knows exactly how many people are affected, since they know how many accounts are handled by the server that went south.

Um, redundancy anyone??? Apple doesn't even know how many accounts were on the server? It goes from bad to worse, if you ask me...

 

[robbyx]

Funny how some people will pay for an email service as unreliable as Mobile Me, yet others will use much more reliable free alternatives like Gmail. Even though the features aren't the same, I am glad I didn't renew my .Mac account.

It's not just email. Believe me, that's the last reason I pay for .Mac/MM. iDisk is the easiest, most Mac-friendly WebDAV service I've found. I've tried a few. And Apple's photo galleries are excellent. A SmugMug account costs nearly half the price of MobileMe and all you get is picture sharing.

So, MobileMe isn't just about email. And .Mac *WAS* quite reliable (slow, but reliable). :-(

 

[robbyx]

Apple should be able to put a bullet through any single random server or set fire to any (unmanned!) building and have no more than a few minutes (DNS TTL) partial downtime. No account should be tied to a particular anything.

AMEN!!!

 

[Vindu]

It seems that Apple has certain blind spots that have led to the same kinds of mistakes coming up again and again.


(1) There are consistent problems with the way Mac OS X interacts with external file servers: it doesn't seem to take into account that network connections vary widely in speed and reliability. It appears to treat all mounted volumes the same, to the extent that Finder will freeze or crash if one of those volumes starts responding unexpectedly (which happens if say the connection is slow or if the external server is under a high load).

(2) Syncing (iSync, .Mac sync, iDisk sync) is prone to catastrophic failure on rare occasions, and much more frequently to lesser failures. A few years ago I lost quite a few important files when iDisk decided to Sync them out of existence. (I now try to be more careful.) David Pogue, in his column cited on this thread, reports that one of his readers turned on Mail and saw it delete all of her email permanently during its Sync, with essentially no hope of recovery.

Accidents like that should have been engineered away right from the very first tech specs. (Lots of ways to do it: send deleted files to a local- or server-based "trash cache" from which they can be recovered within a short time frame; warn the user before deleting large amounts of data, as happens during AddressBook syncing; etc.) It's a basic principle of design: distinguish between intolerable failures and nuisance failures, and always allocate the necessary resources to prevent the former.

(3) On two occasions now, I have turned on my computers to find a sudden unannounced increase in the capacity of my iDisk. On the one hand this is a welcome gift, but on the other hand it is horrifying to see the available disk space plummet towards zero on the hard drive of my by now four-year-old PowerBook, with no explanation and easy way of halting the process. Of course most current users have much larger hard drives and much more available disk space, so there is no nuisance to them. But to some users this could have been ugly.

The fix was to go to .mac online and change the iDisk allocation back to a size reasonable in relation to my hard drive space, and then wait for Finder to catch up with this information and put things right again. Unfortunately .mac was not having a good day, although it did eventually work.

(4) Apple appears not to understand the importance of having good servers.


Somehow all of these complaints seem to have a common basis, which is that Apple appears to treat the "network" (i.e. servers, internet connection, etc) as being a resource of perfect reliability and unconstrained bandwidth. At least, Apple appears to base some of its design and strategic decisions on this principle. Since the principle is clearly false, my conjecture is that it is a matter of ideology more than anything else. This is the same ideology that has brought us the MacBookAir, and it is a bold and sometimes breathtaking paradigm. But it can also be desperately wrong.


cheers
Vin

 

[chewietobbacca]

I tend to agree that Apple needs to realize that absolute security and reliability of email is paramount for many people. MobileMe was a big move for Apple to try and join the enterprise realm once dominated by Blackberry's. However, if they want to be taken seriously, they need to ensure security and reliability which has not shown up yet. Fact of the matter is, unlike a computer which can be RMA'd and fixed do to hardware issues, the cost of people losing emails and data, which can be far more valuable than any single piece of hardware, is something people might not realize. It's why companies spend millions on solid IT infrastructures and security and data privacy. Its why companies spend millions to make sure Exchange and pushing of emails is seamless. I hope Apple gets it sorted out FAST because if not, companies will be even more reluctant to accept iPhones in the business world and questions of Apple's preparedness and reliability will be spread around.