MobileMe Disappointment · Sunday, July 13, 2008

When I first heard about Apple’s new MobileMe service, I was excited by the prospect of being able to keep all of my devices in sync instantly, with no waiting. I was so excited, that I purchased a boxed version of .Mac so that I’d be one of the first to get my hands on the service when it debuted.

One of the main reasons I purchased MobileMe was because of Apple’s beautiful marketing site describing the features of MobileMe. The site states:

MobileMe stores all your email, contacts, and calendars in the cloud and pushes them down to your iPhone, iPod touch, Mac, and PC. When you make a change on one device, the cloud updates the others. Push happens automatically, instantly, and continuously. You don’t have to wait for it or remember to do anything — such as docking your iPhone and syncing manually — to stay up to date.

As it turns out, this is not only misleading, but is essentially a bold-faced lie. While the “push” does occur from your iPhone to the cloud and vice-versa, your Mac only receives and sends updates once every 15 minutes, even if you instruct it to sync “Automatically” in the MobileMe preferences pane on your Mac. Honestly, I expected better from Apple.

In addition to this very irritating issue, I have several other problems with the service, which is billed as “Exchange for the rest of us,” that greatly diminish its usefulness.

I would love to utilize the push email service to manage my personal email. However, I have a personal domain where all of my email is delivered. In addition, I subscribe to many mailing lists, and receive several hundred emails a day. All of my email is neatly organized into folders automatically, using server-side mail filters through the excellent procmail utility.

MobileMe email has two massive shortcomings that make it useless for my situation:

1. You cannot set up MobileMe to handle email for a personal domain, unless you set up your existing mail server to forward email onto MobileMe. I could live without this one, if it were not for the second problem.
2. While rules that you set up in Apple mail “sync” to MobileMe, they are not applied server side. In order for your rules to be applied, you must have a version of Apple Mail running on some computer connected to the internet to apply those rules client-side.

MobileMe is a very compelling service if you just read the marketing, but in the end, in falls extremely short of my expectations from a company like Apple. I have sent my complaints onto MobileMe customer support, and am awaiting a response. Hopefully, they’ll at least acknowledge the misleading marketing.