MobileMe: daily reports

Apple has (finally) acknowledged losing some email data and claims that it will do a better job keeping its customers as to the status of the continuing MobileMe issues. A new status update posted to Apple's website indicates that Apple CEO Steve Jobs has asked an unnamed employee to "write a posting every other day or so to let everyone know what’s happening with MobileMe." The writer, who claims that he is working directly with the MobileMe group, confirms that that a "serious problem" with one its mail servers, but did not post the nature of the problem. Confirming our earlier report, the company said that it was able to restore limited web access to those accounts to allow web-based access to read email that has arrived since last Friday (though not before) as well as send and receive new mail, but that some customers lost data.

"We particularly regret to report the loss in the affected accounts of approximately 10% of the messages received between July 16 and July 18," the Apple wrote without saying what, if anything, the company would do to compensate affected customers.

The new status page comes after the company formally apologized for the launch problems, but problems with the service continued into the second week.

Almost a full week after the email outage began, Apple says it has finally begun rolling out restoration of full access for all the MobileMe accounts, but that it could take another week or so before full access is restored. Several high-profile reviews have continued to question the service's reliability and Apple's ability to implement such a service.

However, the company did acknowledge over 70 bugs were fixed with IMAP, calendar, and sync services and that additional capacity was being added to handle the traffic.

"The day we launched MobileMe, we had a lot more traffic to our servers than we anticipated, with the result that access to the web versions of the MobileMe applications — Mail, Contacts, Calendar, Gallery, iDisk — was temporarily unavailable," the note explained. "We’ve since added server capacity and tuned our software to scale better — i.e. behave more gracefully when traffic spikes."

by MacNN Staff