Farewell, .Mac!
Ever since it was first launched as iTools, I’ve been a loyal .Mac customer. The service has always been a good value, especially when you own multiple Macs and need to keep them in sync. Unfortunately, the service has failed to keep up with many other free offerings, and my Inbox is now frequently overrun with spam. (Apple says they filter for spam, but it seems likely they don’t at the server level.) Of course, Mail.app does a great job of filtering the bad from the good, but my BlackBerry Internet Service account does not. Frankly, it’s irritating being stirred from a deep sleep in the middle of the night by junk ads offering cheap sex drugs, hot stock deals and illegal pornography!
Aside from IMAP e-mail support and synching my Macs, I no longer use the other services it offers. After all, I host all my photography here, and have a similar, iDisk-like tool running on my web server. Because of this, I’ve decided to retire my .Mac account before it renews on February 7. With rival free services providing gigabytes of e-mail storage for free, and companies offering Mac OS X SyncServices-compatible solutions for a one-time fee, there’s no reason to continue paying for the service.
If you currently use my .Mac e-mail address to communicate with me, please take a few moments to update your address books. Send me an e-mail here and I can provide you my new addresses and vCard.
Jaron,
I too have my .mac expiring in a few days and will also be letting it go. Over time, I used less and less of its services and now with my own website, I have almost all the same services for less and on my own site that I can control.
I am glad to read others are also thinking the same as me in regards to .mac.
Nice looking website too.
Hi Jaron - I almost came to the same decision back in Oct. I am holding on for 5 more months. if after the release of Leopard there is no improvement in service ( iDisk is s l o w ) and/or price for the .mac service…. I am gone. I have now pretty well moved all of my email to gmail. I even use the features in gmail to send as if i am sending from my .mac account. All my main contacts are pretty well using my new mail…the rest i don’t care about. I have iCal and iDisk, and Backup replacement in place with Strongspace.com. Firefox now lets me sync my bookmarks. So I have come to the point where i can happily DUMP .mac ’cause it now sucks the big one. Apple has not served us loyal .Mac customers. So Apple you have one last chance. Otherwise it’s Bye Bye .Mac!