Tech Goes Boom

dot-sMacK email

We're coming around to that time of year when it's time to decide whether to renew .Mac. In general it's been pretty good and reliable, and the extras, like calendar and bookmark synchronization and iPhoto web publishing are nice additions to my digital life.

But--you knew there was a "but" coming--.Mac email has taken a turn for the worse lately. The service has been offline for about half an hour at this point, and I'm still waiting for it to come back to life. It's been doing this with disturbing frequency for the last few months.

It's Thursday afternoon Pacific Time, which certainly doesn't seem like an optimal time for a scheduled outage, so most likely something is broken somewhere. Sigh.

Now, I'm not running my business through .Mac or anything silly like that, but when you pay for a service, well, you kind of want it to be reliable.

To add to the frustration, Mail.app doesn't come back with a sensical message like, "The server is unavailable," or anything like that, but lies with a straight face and says the server rejected the password. Would you like to retype it? No, no I wouldn't. Because that won't help. The service is down. Since Apple runs .Mac and makes Mail.app, you'd think they could talk to each other in a civil way.

Oh, well, I'll probably re-up any way, just for the other goodies, but come on, Apple, make the mail server stay up. Pretty please?

UPDATE: One Three Four hours and counting...

UPDATE 2: Apple has just released a knowledge base article about Mail.app's proclivity to blame the password when the mail server has taken a dirt nap.

Listening to: Stream from Secret Agent