Broken .Mac?

An anonymous reader asks: "I paid $50 to convert my iTools account to a .Mac account, yet it seems that I can almost never use the service. The web pages are constantly down and the support for the service tells nothing about to handle the frequent outages. I am not the only person to get these errors. The forums are filled with complaints about the down time. I have e-mail Apple numerous times, but nothing has been done to fix these errors. What options to I have? Is there a way to get my money back for this lousy service? Can I get compensated for the down time? What can I do to show Apple that I am not happy with their service?"

Comments

I haven't had these problems

[grammar nazi]

I paid $50 for .mac and, except for the 1 week of server upgrades, I haven't noticed any downtime. I check my .mac email periodically throughout the day from work (via webmail.mac.com) and when I'm home, my laptop is constantly checking email.

Even during the server upgrades, I only noticed two afternoons which webmail was down.

I actually switched my ISP to forward emails to my .mac account because I perceived .mac to be more reliable than my ISP. I'm going to reevaluate this decision once I read some of the other comments of this Slashdot story.

All in all, I've been happy with .mac, especially the email/iChat/iPhoto-galleries aspect of .mac.

I don't work for Apple and I was a Linux guy until I purchased an Apple.
With linux, my digital camera would be ...like... beep boop beep.
My name is grammar nazi and I correct people's grammar.

BS

[Microsift]

It's really irresponsible to post this story. As Grammar Nazi mentions, there was one brief outage of .mac, and since then it's been smooth-sailing. The outage was well covered by the press. The anonymous submitter would have us believe that outages are ongoing, and that the press has stopped covering this story. Certainly Dvorak would have said something...This appears to be classic Apple-bashing, which is fine if you're trying to make sauce, but not if you're running a news site.

best solution

[tongue]

best solution already posted once

Re:best solution

[Minn_Kota_Marine]

You're right, it has.

Works for me.

[Pathwalker]

I haven't had any problems.

I send about 70 megs to my idisk via backup every day, and I haven't run into any issues.
Are you sure it isn't a problem on your end?

I am constantly having problems with email

[spoot]

constantly. and this is all I use it for anyways. No way I'll cough up a hundred bucks next time around. no way.

rabid religious types

[grue23]

My girlfriend upgraded her iTools to .Mac and she has had myriad problems. In particular the disk part of it seems very flaky; it doesn't seem to handle uploads and downloads very well at all, sometimes. We tried it from her place and from my place and it was very flaky both places. We both have different DSL providers, too.

I also know she's complained about her site being down a couple times. She hasn't been using .Mac nearly as much in the last couple of months so I can't speak to how it's been behaving more recently.

All the people who keep claiming that it's perfect and has only gone down once should recognize that it's possible some people have had a worse experience than others, instead of claiming that people who are complaining are cowardly, or Microsoft's dupes, or whatever. The bad experiences may have something to do with the way .Mac interacts with some firewalls, or some ISPs, but some people have had problems and in fact have better things to do with their time than lie about having problems.

Also - posting to public forums like this is part of a solution if one has repeatedly complained to Apple and still has bad service. It makes the problems more visible, and gives them more of an incentive to correct them.

Not the same experience...

[gamgee5273]

I converted my iTools account ot a .Mac account as well, and, except for the one time the e-mail was acting up, I've noticed none of the outages that people continually complain about.

Working at a help desk always makes me wonder if the complaintants are diagnosing their problems correctly. Have you tried it in different ways, instead of just dealing with one configuration? Don't always assume that the problem is with "them" when it may turn out to be something a little closer to home.

I am not, by far, saying that Apple is perfect. However, when regular .Mac users, both here and on other boards, post that they've had no issues, then I suggest that configuation may be to blame, not the service itself.

How I Solved My .Mac Problems

[maveness]

I couldn't use Backup, I couldn't connect reliably to iDisk, I wasn't able to upload iPhoto images to print, and what was even more annoying, I couldn't post any more than a few sentences to Discussion Boards! Nor could I use the Feedback Form.

I spent A LOT of time troubleshooting. I have an Earthlink DSL connection to the 'net, accessed via Airport. When I connected to the DSL modem directly via ethernet cable, all was well, curiously. Hence, Airport was somehow the problem. After a lot of fussing, I eventually discovered that if I disabled NAT and stopped sharing a single IP to access the 'net, suddenly everything worked.

Needless to say I posted my solution all over .Mac.

I hope it helped some folks, but I didn't get the sense that the Apple moderators were rushing to spread the news, or to confirm the solution. I think the problems started when I upgraded to Jaguar... but in any case, it's clearly a software fix that needs to happen on their end.

There are a lot of very unhappy people on the Discussion Boards at .Mac (yes, of course it's a self-selecting group, but it's a BIG self-selecting group!).

It's for sure that for a lot of folks, the vaunted Apple ease-of-use has been more talk than substance. And that's a damned shame. As an Apple user since 1984, and a shareholder, I'd like to see Apple improve its service ~ and especially its communication ~ to its most loyal customers. If I don't see that improvement, I'm very unlikely to re-up at .Mac, especially for $100.

I'm a .Mac user

[geek]

I have had no trouble with email or webspace but there is a constant nagging problem well documented on their support forums in regards the the backup software. It's basically been dead in the water for 90% of the users for the last 2 months. You can still backup to cd's dvd's etc but backing up to iDisk fails with an "iDisk is unreachable" error.

It's gotten really annoying, Apple has even stated it's fixed but the complaints keep rolling in. It worked fine for me until about 2 weeks ago, then it just stopped altogether.

The backup software sucks in general but seeing as how I paud 100$ for my .Mac I do expect everything to work. The 2 weeks I have been down from backup is unacceptable to me and 2 months + for others is also quite bad.

I'm also disappointed that Apple hasn't delivered on the promise of new features it made when launching .Mac. We were told we would see constant updates and improvements but there hasn't been so much as an added template for the homepage creation wizard.

All in all i think .Mac is a failure. They aren't handling it professionally. Very poor support i.e. no phone number to call for help. No added features. The sign up rate has been slow, I'm the only person I know personally with an account.

I think Apple is going to learn this one the hard way. They just aren't listening to what customers want. You really don't get what you pay for with this service. I could get the same thing for 10 bucks a month from a webhost with added php and cgi support.

I doubt I'll renew my reg next year. They just haven't made due on the hype.

Solipsism abounds...

[finelinebob]

Amazing how if something works perfectly for you (or fails perfectly for you), anyone else who experiences anything different must be a bleedin' nitwit.

My .Mac service goes out regularly every afternoon. Mail has fits trying to retrieve my email. Was in the SoHo store one day and one of the salesfolk there helping me out couldn't connect, and just blew it off acknowledging that things get a bit backed up in the middle of the day.

Then again, living and working in Manhattan, I know the traffic patterns and I know when to stay off the bridges and out of the tunnels if I don't want to be chewing exhaust for an hour or two. And I don't check my .Mac email at 1pm. It might work fine in Podunk, Idaho at 1pm, but not from where I'm sitting.

(...but my Roadrunner service is up all the time =^P )

Re:BS - but matches my experience

[jfaughnan]

My experience has been very consistent with the original poster. Using Goliath instead of the Finder WebDav helped some, but I had webdav access only about 70% of the times I tried. I spent months with .Mac webdav, seeing if it would finally work. Performance was dismal compared to other WebDav service providers I've used (mydocsonline for example).

The web server worked ok, as did email.

I no longer use .Mac.