Apple to compromise on mac.com email?

[amathteacher]

Just a thought...

Since almost everyone with a mac.com email account is a Mac user, isn't it almost like free advertising/publicity for Apple for all of us to be using that service?

 

[oliverlubin]

the 4 pages regarding email-only accounts

the 4 pages were generated back in may and appear to have been modified on july 16. fyi.

mac40.htm
mac41.htm
mac42.htm
mac43.htm

all 4 refer to email-only accounts.

 

[stuartea]

Sam the 'email only' is only available to people who have purchased one .mac account then it's $10 on top for each additional mail only accounts

 

[Talon1138]

.mac (un)secure

How does apple expect people to use .mac for web-based synchronization of contacts and calendars when its not encrypted on their end (according to apple reps at Macworld). In other words, they have full access to anything on your .mac account.

Also, if yu've read the user license for iDisk, Apple has the right to se anything you put on your idisk for their own purposes. For instance, one of your family pictures could be used in an apple ad without your permission and without compensation.

$99 a year to steal your stuff and no encryption?

 

[Wry Cooter]

I can't even get my mac.com mail now, merely because I'm moving, and quit my cable ISP, and am using dial-up through an AOL account I have had since '91, and don't have a location in place for the Mail App to leak through. I guess that's the reason.

Its hard to tell what is going on with all the chicken little running about here-- surely I have at least until Jaguar is released to decide what I want to buy from Apple.... their entire user base doesn't spend hours a day reading MacRumors, or even know what a MacWorld Expo is.

 

[mjtomlin]

Supporting Apple

I've been a long time Apple user. I paid for the .mac account. I'm supporting Apple to make sure they can continue with their R&D and bring out more cool products. In order to do that they need to improve their bottom line. It seems that everyone wants something for nothing and for a while Apple was giving you that. Problem is, economy goes south, they need to make money somehow. Apple has spent a lot of time and money to be able to give us Mac users something unique, I for one am glad they're charging for the services... it'll only mean we'll see better online tools coming down the road.

I do agree with most of you though, they should at least keep the 5MB e-mail account free for those who need/want just that.

We should all be lucky that they haven't charged for the iApps. Personally, i think Apple should port them to Windows and charge those people for'em. Although, offering tech support for Windows users has got to be a nightmare?

mikey

 

[iN8]

Pic of Text

Apple seems to have updated the section in question to more clearly state what was intended. It wasn't like this when I checked it this morning.

 

[ShaolinMiddleFinger]

I just read the attachment above and I've figured out the solution. We should hit Apple where it hurts. If they want to charge us for email. We will charge them for our use of the Macintosh. Everyone should start "sharing" all your Apple programs. Give out copies of Final Cut Pro 3, DVD Studio Pro, OS X...etc....and watch what Apple does. If they want to charge more for their products, let them, but you should allow yourself and others the same option of having it for free. Then, my friends, it will all make us, the consumers happy, and Apple happy.

 

[gopher]

Originally posted by ShaolinMiddleFinger
I just read the attachment above and I've figured out the solution. We should hit Apple where it hurts. If they want to charge us for email. We will charge them for our use of the Macintosh. Everyone should start "sharing" all your Apple programs. Give out copies of Final Cut Pro 3, DVD Studio Pro, OS X...etc....and watch what Apple does. If they want to charge more for their products, let them, but you should allow yourself and others the same option of having it for free. Then, my friends, it will all make us, the consumers happy, and Apple happy.

Alas, this is exactly where Microsoft got to argueing the cost for Microsoft Office is worth it. It is so high to overcome piracy costs. Of course a vicious cycle is started whenever someone charges more for something than they think it is worth. And let me tell you integration is nice to a point. When I get integrated tools I don't need, I don't want to have to pay extra for them. You don't see Apple charging for iMovie or iTunes or iDVD on machines that support it. But watch out, they may in the future.

 

[recurve]

iTools - abuse of Technology

I have similar sentiments with those who believe we deserve a better Email solution from Apple.

Here is a link to a free service for people who simply happen to live in Florida, Georgia, or Alabama (for comparison purposes). It has IMAP, webmail and even free dialup:
http://www.tfn.net/TFN/Register/

Below is a copy of a long message I sent to Apple:

I am outraged that Apple has discontinued iTools.

At the bare minimum you should provide a free lifetime mail forwarding
service for all current iTools members.

$100 is what I roughly paid for OS 9.
$100 is what I roughly paid for OS X.
$3000 is what I roughly paid for my Titanium PowerBook.
$30 is what I paid for QuickTime 5 (which now doesn't work in v6)
$500 is what I paid to be an ADC select member (developer member).
Total is $3730

I remember that the major reason to upgrade to OS 9 was to make use of
iTools. It was explained during the Keynote of that year that as a
benefit of choosing the Mac platform we get iTools. The product was
touted as being a "free" service but we had to purchase OS 9 or buy a
new Mac with OS 9 or later to make use of iTools.

The current policy regarding the demise of iTools is unacceptable. I
have a large number of contacts who regard my recurve@mac.com address as
a lifetime address. Now that Apple has suckered me into giving out this
address to so many people and printing so many business cards with this
address on it you've trapped me. You are forcing me to pay $50 for the
first year and then $100 for every year after that. I don't even want
the level of services you are providing with the new .Mac offering. I
feel tricked and cheated. I feel that Apple is trying to suck all the
money you can out of me. It's the same with QuickTime 6, I'm not even
that excited about Mpeg-4 and now you've taken away my ability to edit
and save QuickTime 5 content without buying a new registration code.
Why can't I keep QuickTime 5 pro?

Below I list three possible approaches which Apple can take if they
really care about me:

1) Keep the iTools services and additionally offer the .Mac services.
Anyone who buys an Apple operating system will be able to use the iTools
services free for one year. Anyone who buys an Apple computer will get
to use iTools services free for three years. Anyone who holds an ADC
membership can have free iTools service for one year. Charge $25 per
year for those people who want to keep their iTools service but haven't
purchased a new operating system or new computer or registered for an
ADC account.

2) Allow all current iTools members to have a forwarding box free of
charge. This does not require our messages to be stored at Apple. It
allows us to avoid pestering our business and personal contacts and keep
one e-mail address for the rest of our life. It also makes life easier
when subscribing to listserves (I subscribe to eight different ones).
When we do change our Email providers we only need to log into Apple's
website and update the forwarding information.

3) Allow us to purchase full fledged Email services for $10 per year.

If Apple does not take any of the above mentioned steps to rectify this
situation then I'll take this as you just don't care about me. Please
don't make me regret adopting iTools. Had I known things would turn out
this way I would have paid for the Mail.com Email services (instead of
using iTools) before I started building so many business and personal
contacts. Please don't make me regret I chose recurve@mac.com to be my
"prestigious" Email address.

I chose the Mac because I don't want to be hassled. I value a company
that provides me with good clear solutions. This is the first time I've
been hassled by Apple and my first computer was the Macintosh 512kE.
Why are you hassling me now?!?

Sincerely,
Aaron Rosenzweig
recurve@mac.com
http://homepage.mac.com/~recurve/

 

[peterjhill]

Originally posted by ShaolinMiddleFinger
Everyone should start "sharing" all your Apple programs. Give out copies of Final Cut Pro 3, DVD Studio Pro, OS X...etc....and watch what Apple does.

What Apple will do is sue you, too bad you probably don't have any money though, the way you whine. How old are you? You should be happy your parents bought you a Mac. If your griping about $100 per year, go somewhere else.

 

[peterjhill]

Re: iTools - abuse of Technology

Originally posted by recurve

3) Allow us to purchase full fledged Email services for $10 per year.

$10 per year? your kidding right. Lets see, Apple is paying for bandwidth, they must have a ton dedicated to the service. Doing some BGP, WHOIS, and traceroute research, it looks like they are using either a gigabit Ethernet connection, or are very close to one. So they are paying for a ton of bandwidth.


Then you add the email servers. They either have one huge mainframe type machine, or a large cluster of rack servers. No matter what, alot of hardware, with lots of disk space, with backups that must be performed regularly. Then networking equipment, probably a highly redundant Cisco Network with gigabit to each server, probably using Cat4000's. So for all this hardware, you also need to pay support contracts every year. They are not cheap. One Cat4000 probably costs about $3-5K per year, just for support. Then you need spares. All of the servers have support contracts. You need to buy new backup tapes all the time.

Then the software, they not only had to pay for it initially, but also are paying a support contract for that.

Okay, now the people that you need to pay to administer the:
Email server software
Server Hardware
Networking Equipment
Managers to take care of it all
In house support personel
Secretaries, electricity, benefits...

That is alot of freakin money to spend to give customers a decent email service!

Everyone thinks that apple can magically give away all this stuff on the cheap, and that is just email!

I just checked out the webmail. There are NO BANNER ADS!!! Go to hotmail and see how many popup ads you get and stupid x10 freakin ads. I get very little SPAM in my mac.com account, so I don't believe that apple has sold my address to any marketers. So they are not making money off of your free email account to offset the costs. Hotmail has banner ads, and sure as hell sell your email address. Nothing is free. Some things are worth paying for, and I think that .mac is worth the price of admission.

 

[Taft]

Re: Re: iTools - abuse of Technology

Originally posted by peterjhill

Everyone thinks that apple can magically give away all this stuff on the cheap, and that is just email!

I just checked out the webmail. There are NO BANNER ADS!!! Go to hotmail and see how many popup ads you get and stupid x10 freakin ads. I get very little SPAM in my mac.com account, so I don't believe that apple has sold my address to any marketers. So they are not making money off of your free email account to offset the costs. Hotmail has banner ads, and sure as hell sell your email address. Nothing is free. Some things are worth paying for, and I think that .mac is worth the price of admission.

There are a *ton* of free e-mail services out there. The cost of running e-mail services for a lot of people doesn't necessarily go up with the number of people who are using the service. Bandwidth and storage are the only things that increase with increased usage.

But you're missing the point of all of this: Apple is pissing off its user base by *forcing* everyone who wants a mac.com e-mail address to upgrade.

The point is that many people use their mac.com e-mail as their sole e-mail and have used it with the understanding that it was free. Many of these people are young people or people without large sources of income (though *you* may be able to afford it, many people--ahem, students--have a hard enough time paying their internet access bills).

Now Apple is forcing us to buy a large group of services even if all we want is e-mail. Don't get me wrong, the services are great and a pretty good deal. But it doesn't change the fact that not everyone wants them.

Finally, I understand the plight Apple is in: serving e-mail and an internet harddrive is not free. The have to make money, and giving away these services is not going to make them money. But the membership fees for .mac would more than offset the cost of offering 5MB of e-mail for free to those who don't want the rest of the services.

Apple isn't in the business of web services. They are in the business of selling hardware. The iApps and web services are niceties that make the Mac hardware more attractive. By pissing off the current users of their historically free e-mail, they only stand to lose in future sales of hardware.

By offering a free e-mail address along side their robust .Mac pay service, they can avoid losing money on their web services AND avoid pissing off their ever so loyal customer base.

Taft

 

[Wash!!]

Email

I just got an email from apple stating that due to increasing cost they must start charging for the email service.

bye bye apple email I just go back to use my ISP email. In all the years I been using Apple products I have never felt so cheated.

Apple wants to become in 1 year what M$ has done in 10, really bad move. And its reflecting in their sales, and share price.

 

[G4scott]

let me just clarify something... Apple may have said "free iTools for life", but since they're not calling it iTools, then they can charge. They didn't say "iTools for life" They just meant that as long as it was called iTools, it would be free.

 

[boobers]

Re: Re: iSync needs .mac?!

Originally posted by peterjhill

Not that anyone asked, but I think that $50, and even $100 is reasonable for the services that they are offering. Particularly the backup stuff. I don't need to backup my whole drive, just some irreplaceable docs. Besides, photos and mp3s are easily burned to disc.

.mac is BULLSH!T! as another fellow canadian pointed out to me 100 US is 160 Canadian..
Sooo i can get a dial-up account for 10.00CAN per month and host a website with the possibility of adding a DNS to it. Also this server would allow me to run CGI scripts and PHP.. does idisk allow for this? nope.. and how much is 120 bux canadian in US dollars? 75 bux US
why would i get a .mac account with a bunch of useless features when i can get, dial-up access, email account, Professional web serving space and free phone support for alot cheaper? why i ask you? why Steve?
make me understand..

 

[peterjhill]

A quick check of free pop mail services, let see hotpop.com You can get 10MB of mailboxes for free, but guess what,

HotPOP supports its service through two methods, advertisements and subscriptions. While we prefer users to be subscribers and think it provides a better experience, we realize that many users would rather experience our services free of charge. To help support those users, we send advertisements from select companies to your HotPOP mailbox, and display banners and other ads on our website.

Or how about Howlermonkey.net
Oh...

SORRY, no new accounts accepted at this time.

Humm...
iMailBox

Free service limited to 30 days

There are a whole slew, it seems they are all either going to flood you with ads, or you will have to pay. I hope that Apple does allow web access to @mac.com email. I would not blame them from stopping pop and imap support, as they use far more bandwidth. I have mail mail client check for new mail every minute, but I would not click refresh on a web page nearly as often. all the graphics for the web pages would be cached in the users web cache.

I challenge someone to find a pop and imap service that is free with at least 5MB of mailbox space, that does not sell your email account. To test it I will open an account on it, not give the address out to anyone, and see how long until I get my first piece of spam on it.

 

[boobers]

yahoo is free

web based email that is for the most part spam free..and it has a spam box for all the spam to go into..complete with spam filters...way,WAY better than hotmail.

 

[ShaolinMiddleFinger]

Originally posted by peterjhill


What Apple will do is sue you, too bad you probably don't have any money though, the way you whine. How old are you? You should be happy your parents bought you a Mac. If your griping about $100 per year, go somewhere else.

Ahhh...did your mommy buy you yours! Dork! I paid for my Mac(S)! With that expense you should get a free email which allows Apple to advertise for them...(mac.com) If you start to make assumptions on people you don't know. then you're and idiot, so shut up, go home, re think your life and hopefully you don't commit suicide!

 

[peterjhill]

As a quick think yahoo email is free, but does not support pop and imap. I will not live without it, I like my mailer too much.

I just found this on Apple's site:

.Mac members can purchase up to 10 additional email accounts for $10.00 each per year. Email-only accounts include 5 megabytes (MB) of storage space, which can't be increased.

This is perfect. Now my wife can have a .mac email also. At $10 it is cheaper than upgrading her hotmail account, which would be $19.95 per year.

 

[mingso]

Originally posted by peterjhill
I challenge someone to find a pop and imap service that is free with at least 5MB of mailbox space, that does not sell your email account. To test it I will open an account on it, not give the address out to anyone, and see how long until I get my first piece of spam on it.

It does exist. Check out MyRealBox.
But, nothing is perfect, if you need some service that is 100% guaranteed up and reliable, this is not the way to go. Majorly is because this service is setup by Novell as a software test site.

 

[peterjhill]

Originally posted by ShaolinMiddleFinger
Ahhh...did your mommy buy you yours! Dork!

No actually. She didn't, I have a job which bought me my Ti800. Do you know what a job is?

I paid for my Mac(S)! With that expense you should get a free email which allows Apple to advertise for them...(mac.com)

I bought a car from Mazda, does that mean they should buy my gas for me, since the car has Mazda's name on it?

If you start to make assumptions on people you don't know. then you're and idiot,

I am basing my comments on your posts. I think that is quite fair. You have proven yourself to me to be a whiner. I wish they had a way to squelch posters.

so shut up, go home, re think your life and hopefully you don't commit suicide!

Nice English. Is it your second language. Whatever dude.

 

[peterjhill]

Originally posted by mingso


It does exist. Check out MyRealBox.
But, nothing is perfect, if you need some service that is 100% guaranteed up and reliable, this is not the way to go. Majorly is because this service is setup by Novell as a software test site.

Interesting:

MyRealBox is as an Engineering test site
The engineering team that programs the NetMail software uses MyRealBox as a testbed to try out new versions before releasing them as part of the NetMail product. This means that from time to time MyRealBox users will experience downtime due to installation of new software or due to the engineering team debugging a new feature.

They do have a very nice privacy policy, but like I said, users will end up paying for "free email" one way or another. In this case it is due to the fact that users of the service will be betatesters, and service availability is not one of the top priorities. I don't think this service would be a good fit for me, as I use my @mac.com email address as my primary personal email account, and downtime is not something I can deal with.

 

[ShaolinMiddleFinger]

Originally posted by peterjhill

No actually. She didn't, I have a job which bought me my Ti800. Do you know what a job is?

I bought a car from Mazda, does that mean they should buy my gas for me, since the car has Mazda's name on it?

I am basing my comments on your posts. I think that is quite fair. You have proven yourself to me to be a whiner. I wish they had a way to squelch posters.

Nice English. Is it your second language. Whatever dude.

You're not worth my time. This is the last post that i'm replying you in.

Job- yeah, I know what that is. If I didn't know what a job was, how would I have afforded a Mac?

Gas vs. 5 mb email....hmmm...which one would cost more? I'm fine with 5mb. email. Pop up banners? hmmm, not really fine with that but I can always close them. If needed I would pay $10 instead of a $100 for extra services I would never use.

English, no it's not my second language. Are you being prejudice against people who are, though, because there are a lot of people here that do have English as a 2nd language.

If your going to base your comments upon my other posts....i would do the same to you but like I said earlier, you're not worth my time.

 

[peterjhill]

Originally posted by ShaolinMiddleFinger

English, no it's not my second language. Are you being prejudice against people who are, though, because there are a lot of people here that do have English as a 2nd language.

Umm... No, I was commenting on your grammer, or lack thereof. Your right, it was unfair of me to compare nonnative English speakers to you. Your grammer is much worse.