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Apple acknowleges email delivery problems with .Mac

updated 11:10 pm EST, Mon February 2, 2004

.Mac email problems

Apple today service, resulting in loss of some email: "The following is a quote from a moderator of the .Mac discussion forums. 'From 12:30pm to 4:00pm PST some portion of .Mac Mail was not received as expected. All mail services are currently operational. Messages sent to .Mac recipients are now being delivered in a timely fashion.' I sent myself a message during the outage, and it never showed up in my box. Be warned that incoming mail to your .mac account may have been lost during this period." [Forums link requires .Mac membership]

by MacNN Staff

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02/02, 11:19pm | report spam | close Reply |
that explains it!

That explains why my business came to a GRINDING HALT.

Talk about a total pile of beat up @###.

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02/02, 11:30pm | report spam | close Reply |
I agree...

.mac has some serious @#$#$# explaining to do - they are CHARGING money for this service now and they really need to do better than "your E-mail has been lost, have the sender re-send it".

How do I know what I didn't get!?!?!? Or what people I sent E-mails didn't get!?!?

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02/02, 11:37pm | report spam | close Reply |
LOST MAIL!?

How the h*** did they *lose* mail? It should either get resent or an error message should go to the sender that it was undeliverable. .mac is a PAID service - I can't believe they seem to be having so many problems with E-mail. It seems like at least once a month they are having issues - I might not renew my membership next year. Too bad. :(

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02/02, 11:47pm | report spam | close Reply |
what apple can do to help

apple: notifying customers about this is a really good idea. I suggest scrubbing logs for incoming mail during the affected period and notifying customers who lost mail, and who it was from.

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02/02, 11:51pm | report spam | close Reply |
RIPE.

these complaints are just RIPE to annoy the s*** out of me for 10-15 minutes.

Quit whining you babies. Technology goes wrong no matter how much you pay for it.

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02/03, 12:36am | report spam | close Reply |
just kidding

just kidding

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02/03, 12:43am | report spam | close Reply |
Just great

I've sent out how many damned e-mails / resumes, and now I
don't have any idea how many if any got through!

THIS SUCKS!

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02/03, 01:04am | report spam | close Reply |
Re: just great

Well, doesn't matter, becasue any employer seeing a .Mac address would note your one of those fruity mac users and wouldn't want you working with them anyway.

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02/03, 01:12am | report spam | close Reply |
fruity?

Seriously? Thanks for the kind words. When I lose my house,
I'll be thinking of you.

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02/03, 02:10am | report spam | close Reply |
.Mac

I received a .Mac one-year membership with my PowerMac. I haven't activated it yet. I'm wondering if I'll ever...

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02/03, 04:20am | report spam | close Reply |
humour

well you've lost your sense of humour already. .mac has always lost the odd e-mail, i know that one or two e-mails i've sent or had sent to me over the last year or so have just vanished.

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02/03, 05:01am | report spam | close Reply |
Hmm..

From mac supporta:

''Feb 2, 2004
From 12:30pm to 4:00pm PST some portion of .Mac Mail was not received as expected. All mail services are currently operational. Messages sent to .Mac recipients are now being delivered in a timely fashion.

Regards,
.Mac Support ''

Notice, everything sendt to .Mac accounts will eventually appear. It's the mails that have been sent from .mac accounts that might or might not have been lost for some ppl.

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02/03, 06:06am | report spam | close Reply |
re: that explains it!

"That explains why my business came to a GRINDING HALT.
Talk about a total pile of beat up @###."

Let me think about this for a second...
Nope. Still no sympathy for you. I knew I as gonna read this forum I see someone complaining about their business. Like when one person based their business on it when it was free, and complained when they had to pay or change their business email.

Here's the deal. I know you love to show your customers your Mac dedication and all, but .MAC is intended as a CONSUMER service. No business dependability built in. If you want to provide the best service to your clients, seek reliability over cheap consumer oriented service.

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02/03, 06:45am | report spam | close Reply |
Cry me a river

What a pathetic bunch of whining babies. Just shut up.

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02/03, 06:58am | report spam | close Reply |
Boohoo

If you don't like .Mac, then don't bother using it.

Plain and simple, you moronic whiners.

.Mac was never intended for business use. It serves you all right.

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02/03, 07:54am | report spam | close Reply |
I agree

The University of Texas manages over 100,000 email boxes. When the server has problems, the incoming mail is cached then sent at a later time. It never loses mail. In the last 8 years, it has never been lost. Apple needs to fly out to Austin and see how it's done. .Mac is too expensive to have outtages.

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02/03, 08:23am | report spam | close Reply |
.mac spam

i have just started receiving spam in my .mac account. really annoying. i thought that address was only sent to safe third parties, but it's possible a bot has ferreted out my email address.

i only bring it up because .mac mail was working fine for me, then the spam, then this outage notice. maybe they're related? maybe not... i still hate spammers.

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02/03, 08:37am | report spam | close Reply |
We deserve reliability

I and a lot of other people use .Mac for business use -- not a full-fledged business, but a one-man shop/work at home/self employed type of business. I hardly think it's too much to expect that we actually have reliable email. And even if all we used the email for was writing to our grandmas, we still deserve reliable service!

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02/03, 08:38am | report spam | close Reply |
ripe?

technology goes wrong? stop whining? is that a joke? i don't use .mac, i use yahoo mail plus and i've NEVER EVER EVER EVER EVER lost anything. ever. yahoo has had problems like everybody, but they have it covered. .mac has repeating problems and they don't have it covered.

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02/03, 09:34am | report spam | close Reply |
Re: ripe

i don't use .mac, i use yahoo mail plus and i've NEVER EVER EVER EVER EVER lost anything.

How do you know you never lost anything? Do you follow up on every outgoing mail to make sure they get it? Does everyone you know follow up on all mail that they send you to make sure you got it?

I just love people who say they've never had problems elsewhere. Hey, I never had problems with the US Postal Service either, as far as I know, but there might be a whole boatload of mail I'm missing and don't know about it.

But it serves you all right for paying for .Mac in the first place.

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02/03, 10:04am | report spam | close Reply |
trolls

first off, what a bunch of trolls... i can't believe we're resorting to name-calling over a few comments about a technical failure. these are not the mac users i know.

YES you should expect that problems will occur with any technical service. however, a pay service especially should have safeguards in place to rectify any issues that may arise from said technical problems. consumer or not, we all have a right to expect a high level of service - that's what a service based economy is all about, providing the best SERVICES... The message from apple above does not mention whether messages which were not sent out will be eventually delivered to the user; i know for a fact that a number of messages from my university account, which are normally forwarded to .mac, never got through; fortunately, my work stuff goes to the university account first and i was able to keep abreast of everything important by checking that account directly. but i also know that there were probably some emails that were sent directly to my .mac name, and i deserve to get those messages, or at least have a reply sent out to the sender letting them know that i never got it. i suspect however, from the obviously intentional vagueness of the statement from apple, that there's a good chance that i'll never know what those messages said. some were undoubtedly spam, but others may have been important; i communicate with friends and family and get notices regarding sveral other paid services sent to my .Mac name. any service that wants to keep its customers should be doing its damndest to ensure reliability through redundancy and safeguards; we all have a right to expect that, ESPECIALLY of a pay service.

finally, perhaps most significantly from a business standpoint for apple: if apple is serving this mail from its own machines, as i believe they say they are, they's got some 'splainin' to do - and it sure doesn't look good at a time when they're trying to tout their products' reliability and make sales in the enterprise market...

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02/03, 10:07am | report spam | close Reply |
regardless

Regardless of whether people are using .Mac for small businesses or to forward a cookie recipe to grandma, regardless of whether we .Mac subscribers should be "punished" for paying for it in the first place... this is 2004, people. E-mail works, or at least it *should*. Incidentally, I sent and received e-mail from my .Mac account during the outage period just fine, so I'm just glad it didn't happen to me, as I had some fairly important e-mails go out during that time.

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02/03, 10:24am | report spam | close Reply |
Data Loss = Mission Fail

Hardware failures occur, and can be expected. h***, it's what most IT professionals plan for and safeguard against.

Data loss is not acceptable except in extreme cases (like the NY power failure). This is not an extreme case, and Apple needs to devote more resources to safeguard the data.

It's pretty damn embarrassing that Apple, of all companies, is struggling with this.

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02/03, 10:45am | report spam | close Reply |
?

"That explains why my business came to a GRINDING HALT."

If you're using .Mac for business, that's sad. It's a consumer service idiot.

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02/03, 11:39am | report spam | close Reply |
Who's Your Daddy Man?

All your emails are belong to us.

BTW, since when did football become an outlet for saggy t***?

I'm still pukin', not from the beer, from the shot of something aiming for the floor but appeared to be a boob. My mind is scarred.

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02/03, 12:01pm | report spam | close Reply |
RE: .Mac

>I received a .Mac one-year membership with my PowerMac. I haven't activated it yet. I'm wondering if I'll ever...

I don't think you ever will cause you're obviously too lazy to move the mouse around and type some keystrokes to activate it. Pathetic and whiney - they make PCs for people like you.

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02/03, 02:12pm | report spam | close Reply |
Ya

What he said man.

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02/03, 02:56pm | report spam | close Reply |
Lost mail is unacceptable

In my past, I did back end work for ISPs. We always considered lost email to be completely unacceptable, sort of like a mechanic who damages a car brought in for service. I did not care whether it was a resume, a viagra ad, or cooing message to your sweetie - my job was to make sure the mail got through.

This made the job kind of unpleasant at times, as it sometimes meant losing a weekend, or having to do a lot of difficult debugging under a bunch of stress. That said, we virtually always succeeded, partially because we had good failover.

It also cost a lot of money. Fine - customers paid for that reliability.

I suspect that Apple needs to take similar care, and to publicize heavily every failure they get. Then, if they are doing it right, show that the failures are going down with time, or at least not rising with load.

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02/03, 04:56pm | report spam | close Reply |
Where's the link?

Until you post a link, this is a lie.

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02/04, 07:49pm | report spam | close Reply |
yep, it never came

Just got a call from a partner wondering why I didn't respond to his email. It's because I haven't received it! How wonderful.

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Apple acknowleges email delivery problems with .Mac

updated 11:10 pm EST, Mon February 2, 2004

.Mac email problems

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that explains it!

I agree...

LOST MAIL!?

what apple can do to help

RIPE.

just kidding

Just great

Re: just great

fruity?

.Mac

humour

Hmm..

re: that explains it!

Cry me a river

Boohoo

I agree

.mac spam

We deserve reliability

ripe?

Re: ripe

trolls

regardless

Data Loss = Mission Fail

?

Who's Your Daddy Man?

RE: .Mac

Ya

Lost mail is unacceptable

Where's the link?

yep, it never came

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