World of Apple

via 9to5Mac

Any MobileMe customer’s email can potentially be obtained via information viewable in the form of their public folder’s name making it a possible lucrative source of valid email addresses for spammers.

Also via TechCrunch

“Apple knows about the problem but insists it isn’t an issue because no one has complained publicly. An Apple representative said to one of our readers: ‘We’ve never had a complaint from a customer about people spamming them because of their iDisk public folder name. There is no way to remove your account name from the iDisk folders. I’m very sorry.’”

When will the MobileMess end? It’s the name I tell you! If they kept it .mac, everything would be fine!

In addition to last months one month extension to existing MobileMe subscribers, Apple has today announced that all MobileMe subscribers will receive an additional 60 days free.

The announcement came via email, which read:

We have already made many improvements to MobileMe, but we still have many more to make. To recognize our users’ patience, we are giving every MobileMe subscriber as of today a free 60 day extension. This is in addition to the one month extension most subscribers have already received. We are working very hard to make MobileMe a great service we can all be proud of. We know that MobileMe’s launch has not been our finest hour, and we truly appreciate your patience as we turn this around. Read this article for more details.

The MobileMe Team

Since its launch in July, MobileMe has been dogged with issues. First subscribers were offered a free 30 day extension and then several days later some trial customers were given another 30 day extension to their subscription due to a billing issue.

Earlier this month Apple CEO Steve Jobs sent out an internal memo at Apple admitting many of the issues with MobileMe.

After this mornings report from Ars Technica that Steve Jobs had sent an internal email explaining the issues with MobileMe the site has now published the email in full.

Team,

Steve

According to Ars Technica, Apple CEO Steve Jobs has recently sent out an email to employees admitting the issues with MobileMe saying that the services launch was “not up to Apple standards”.

In the email Jobs reportedly acknowledges many of MobileMe’s flaws and explains how the entire launch could have been handled better, adding that more time and testing was also needed.

Jobs wrote that MobileMe’s services should have been rolled out slowly instead of launching it “as a monolithic service”.

“It was a mistake to launch MobileMe at the same time as iPhone 3G, iPhone 2.0 software and the App Store,” Jobs wrote in an email to employees. “We all had more than enough to do, and MobileMe could have been delayed without consequence”.

Additionally Eddy Cue is now heading up the MobileMe team, cue who previously was in charge of the iTunes Store is now in charge of Internet services, including MobileMe, the App Store and the iTunes Store.

“The MobileMe launch clearly demonstrates that we have more to learn about Internet services,” Jobs says. “And learn we will. The vision of MobileMe is both exciting and ambitious, and we will press on to make it a service we are all proud of by the end of this year”.

Apple has updated the MobileMe status blog with further information for the 1% of users who have been affected by Mail issues.

According to David G. the author of the blog, the issues have now been resolved but anyone still experiencing issues should make use of a dedicated support line.

We have completed restoring Mail service, including historical messages, to all of the 1% of affected members. Thank you all for your extreme patience during this trying time. If you have been affected by this issue and are still having problems we have established a dedicated chat line to reach a MobileMe Mail specialist for help. Please use this dedicated chat line for Mail issues only. By completing this restoration of Mail services, we hope we have put the vast majority of MobileMe Mail problems behind us and can now focus on improving other aspects of this new ambitious service.

In the same post Apple also acknowledges a bug that struck many users on Monday that caused contacts and calendar information to disappear from their devices but stayed on the MobileMe cloud and computers.

Late Monday afternoon Apple fixed the issues and everyone’s contacts and calendar data is said to have been restored.

Apple has started a blog detailing the ongoing issues with MobileMe, the company’s replacement for .Mac.

Last week World of Apple detailed an issue where 1% of MobileMe users were unable to receive mail.

As the issue appears to be ongoing Steve Jobs has reportedly made a request for a blog to be setup detailing the continuing effort to resolve the issues.

An RSS feed of the blog is also available.

According to MobileMe’s support site around 1% of users are unable to access MobileMe mail, according to some the outage has lasted for around 4 days.

CNN Money is also reporting the issues:

The Cupertino, Calif., company has been migrating its .Mac pay email service to an upgraded version, called MobileMe. But in doing so, it has run into problems including service outages and customers losing access to their accounts. It’s the latest in a string of issues that have cropped up since the launch of the latest iPhone, an unusual turn for a company known for its attention to detail in its products and services.

The launch of MobileMe has been tarnished by a poor initial rollout and slow response in the past couple of weeks.

During the transition from .Mac to MobileMe it appears Apple has inadvertently charged customers signing up for a free trial. When customers sign up for a trial of MobileMe Apple pre-authorises a charge but it appears that many customers had that charge removed from their accounts, Apple is working to reverse the charges and sent out an email of apology to those affected offering a 30-day extension to their trial period.

Dear MobileMe Member,

Sincerely,
The MobileMe Team

Last week Apple sent out an email apologising for the problematic and slow transition from .Mac to MobileMe and offered every user a 30-day extension to their subscription.

Apple has today sent an email to MobileMe customers with an apology and an automatic 30-day extension to their MobileMe subscription for free. MobileMe launched late last week but suffered issues causing online services to be down for over 24 hours.

Apple also admitted in the email that use of the term “push” when talking about Macs and PCs syncing to the service was misleading.

Below is the email that Apple sent to customers.

We have recently completed the transition from .Mac to MobileMe. Unfortunately, it was a lot rockier than we had hoped.

Thank you,
The MobileMe Team

Following the official launch of MobileMe late last week a knowledge base article on Apple’s support site began raising concerns amongst some.

The article outlines that instant data sync only occurs to MobileMe from the web interface or a portable device such as iPhone or iPod touch. The main concern is that changes made on a Mac will not be instantly synced back to MobileMe but changes will be updated automatically every 15 minutes or manually by hitting the “Sync” button.

Also regarding MobileMe, Apple has confirmed that the iDisk File Sharing feature of the service will be delayed.

In response to a customers support email “Mike” of Apple’s MobileMe Support team wrote, “When MobileMe was announced, iDisk File Sharing was mentioned as a feature; however, the MobileMe webpage noted that all features listed on that page were subject to change,” continuing, “When MobileMe was released on July 10, 2008, iDisk File Sharing was not included. I apologize for any inconvenience.”

Apple’s website lists iDisk as coming soon but doesn’t offer any timeline as to when the feature will be enabled.

To help some users, Apple has pointed many users towards this support article, which describes other ways in which MobileMe users can share the contents of their remote iDisks.