A Week with MobileMe: Day Six

Another day with MobileMe passes. Lazy Sunday afternoon, with little traffic coming through the inbox. I played a little more with my Firefox mailto handler, trying what I could to make it work, but to no avail. I’ve given up on it. I can only hope Apple comes around and realizes how huge turn off this usability problem is. It takes so little work to hook into the OS to do this, but they chose not to spend the extra day to implement it. Ohy.

Third time I’ve gotten this message in the week I’ve been using the service. I have no idea why it crops up. If it’s due to servers being offline for maintenance, you’d think they’d have a less erroneous error to display. If you can’t validate an account, why not use the cached trial end date you clearly have stored somewhere? It’s not like any of the sync capacity could be used if someone simply faked their trial date; it’s controlled by the servers, not the client.

I’ve noticed one additional flaw with MobileMe Mail: it appears to “freeze” internally every so often, causing refreshes and new mail notifications to fail. Now, this is different from the whole-browser-freeze I’ve been ranting about since I started this challenge; this is strictly a backend thing. Things simply stop working. Haven’t found any specific rhyme or reason to it, but I can only assume it has to do with a server becoming unavailable on Apple’s end, and the client AJAX being unable to recover from failed connection attempts. Once again, Apple, just attach some damn timeout functions to your AJAX calls so you can track this stuff.

Another goofy problem I encountered with Mail this morning: everytime I went to access a message, it reported that the message had already been moved and isn’t available, then it would disappear from my inbox. Refreshed the page and the supposedly moved mails were still there, and they were now accessible. Damn odd.

Tomorrow is my last day in this challenge, and I must be honest; I’m looking forward to it.

Read my thoughts from day one, two three, four, five, six or seven.