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kman42 · Mar 10, 2007, 03:34 AM

Does it always say they are working to provide a better experience when dotMac goes down?

.Mac will be back shortly.
The .Mac service you are looking for is temporarily unavailable while we perform scheduled maintenance. .Mac services are available 24/7 with the exception of short maintenance periods such as this. Currently we are at work to provide you with an even better .Mac experience. We apologize for any inconvenience. Please check back shortly.

Railroader · Mar 10, 2007, 03:45 AM

Huh, my email account with .mac just said my password was incorrect. Mail.app has been faithfully checking my email with the same password for the last year, suddenly about 2 minutes ago it says my password is incorrect.

.mac sucks.

I was mostly using it for the sync features and iDisk. Looks like it's time to abandon it like everyone else seems to have.

macjakob · Mar 10, 2007, 04:17 AM

Man, relax! It's probably just down for maintenance.

vmarks · Mar 10, 2007, 09:06 AM

"a better experience" can mean 'one that won't go down again,' it doesn't necessarily mean there are improvements you'll notice in store.

I would like to use it for cal and addressbook syncing, but for some reason, it doesn't like adding my laptop.

Zeeb · Mar 10, 2007, 09:22 AM

If I were you I would take this time to sign up for a free gmail account or something--then make sure you don't renew it the next time your membership comes up.

Unless of course, they come back with some great new feature, like 100GB's of online storage.

ghporter · Mar 10, 2007, 09:39 AM

When I read the title of this thread, I was almost positive the point was going to be "Dot Mac is down-and I think this is a better experience!" I have never bothered with .mac because of all the negative reports-and because I have email and such available from eleventy-billion other sources, most of which are free. The cost-benefit analysis ("let's see...expensive and prone to being offline, versus free and almost always available everywhere... hmmmmm...") tells me to go with the other services.

Railroader · Mar 10, 2007, 01:15 PM

Originally Posted by macjakob

Man, relax! It's probably just down for maintenance.

Why aren't my other hosting services from other companies ever "down for maintenance"?

They are faster, offer more services, and far cheaper.

Buh-bye .mac.

Mar 10, 2007, 02:23 PM

Originally Posted by Railroader

Why aren't my other hosting services from other companies ever "down for maintenance"?

They probably are but they don't announce it and they were at times you didn't notice.

Railroader · Mar 10, 2007, 02:43 PM

Originally Posted by hayesk

They probably are but they don't announce it and they were at times you didn't notice.

My email for my other services is checked every 2 minutes. For .mac it is checked every 10. And yet I have never had a single downtime for the other services and at least every couple months with .mac. There are many times I have to refresh a page request because for some reason .mac won't send it. I NEVER have that problem with my other services.

So, although your idea would seem possible, it's highly improbable.

skipjack · 08:44 PM

[QUOTE=Railroader;3322876And yet I have never had a single downtime for the other services and at least every couple months with .mac.[/QUOTE]

I have a school account, .Mac, and Earthlink. For me, it happens with all of them. It does not happen often or regularly. Yes, .Mac happens to be the last one that did this, but my experience does not give me any reason to expect it to be the next one to have a service outage.

Edit: .Mac is no longer the last one with downtime. pacbell.net (that is, ATT) now holds that distinction