.Mac Alternatives?

You can get a domain etc. which is kind of like .Mac, but you won't get iDisk and Mac syncing.

 

What are you wanting from the service?

Is price the issue or features?

Woof, Woof - Dawg

 

webdav account?

 

Nope I have been looking for a month and there is definitely no viable alternatives to .Mac which is the most complete solution for the cheapest price today.

You won't find something that is as deeply integrated in the OS while providing so many features.

For the backup you can go with Amazon S3 + JungleDisk but you will not have the web interface similar to the iDisk, it's strictly backup (S3Browse and S3Interface are horribly ugly and unmanageable). On the other hand you can have a sort of iDisk with Omnidrive but you will not be able to do incremental backup and everyone complains about their paid Webdav access in their forum. Box.net webdav access is just a joke and super slow.

IMAP email for free just does not exist.

Synhronizing data requires many applications most of them are not free. Take GSync for example, it sync you iCal to google cal perfectly but it has a small cost.

There is not direct way to sync the address book to Gmail contacts, it requires a soft that export and reimport a CSV file.

Google just launched a storage option. You can get 6 extra GB shared with GMail and Picasaweb for 20 bucks. Considering the previously mentionned upload limit and lack of integration with other services it's really not worth it.

Now that .Mac has been upgraded it's even better integrated with iPhotos, iMovies and iWeb.

Last month I tried .Mac one day and canceled my account. It was not worth it. However I 'm really happy to have resubscribed after the upgrade


As long as you are not looking for
- all .Mac features
- an all in one account attached to all features and consequentely something homogeneous
- something integrated with yur computer and applications
- something adless
- something you don't need to tweak to make it work (creating databases for advanced calendering/address book synchronization for example.

Then you'll be happy with what's around .Mac...not that it means it's gonna be free of any charges...

 

Generally agreed with the points in the post, but this one just isn't true. As much antipathy as we all have for AOL, AOL's free IMAP service is excellent -- decent (but not exceptional) web interface, 2GB of storage, easily integrable with most mobile devices, etc. And honestly, it's no worse than anyone else in terms of attracting spam. I don't use mine that much, and I really receive essentially no spam on it.

P.S. If there ever is a good free iDisk type of service, I wanna know!