With everyone and their uncle providing email addresses with some other type of service it is hard to tell the good from the bad. Well, if you have an Apple computer there`s no doubt you’ve had a strong push from Apple to sign up for their .Mac (translated to “dot mac”). Is the service any good?
Well, if you are a home user and need a good email account then dot mac may be a pretty good solution for you. It is a bit a on the pricey side if you are looking for email by itself ($99 USD or 9,800 yen in Japan). However, the filtering for junk (“spam”) mail and viruses is pretty effective. We unleashed one of our spammed email addresses on it and it seems to take out 99 out of 100 spam messages.
If you are more than a one Mac family, the cool thing about Dot Mac is that the email syncs on all your computers. You can start an email on your Mac Book on the train, work on it at the office at lunch via the very well done webmail interface, then finish it off at home on your G5 Desktop. Apple uses the IMAP (email protocol that requires a connection to the server) that is nothing new but they`ve done a good job of maximizing it and getting away of the very common POP3 setup (downloading the email messages to your PC via Outlook, Thunderbird or some other email client from the server).
The mail application is good, but where you start to see the beauty of Dot Mac is all the integrated services. The synchronizing of your mail is just the beginning. You can set your main Mac to sync all of your mail, browser bookmarks, other mail accounts, mail filters. This is a great feature if you have multiple machines. I have an iMac in my living room that has all the exact settings of my G5 in my home office. The G5 has the exact mail, bookmarks and information on my Mac Book. It was a bit of a nuisance having my main machine constantly updating to Dot Mac. It seemed to slow things down a bit so I changed my settings to an hourly sync.
It is clear that Apple listens to its users. They increased the account sizes to 10 GB… finally. Dot Mac has an online gallery, which is great for sharing family pictures simply from your iPhoto application. You now have the ability to make your own web page. Before it just was something like http://web.mac.com/username.
People want to put their websites on their own domains (www.myname.com for example) so Apple added the feature to use your own domain name when making a website. You can make a really good looking website with iWeb, their web editor application. If you want to make a good looking site you probably want to use the new version of iWeb (2008) as it better supports using your own domain names and it cost effective. There isn’t much on Apple`s website about using your own domain names.
There are a lot of things we can talk about regarding the Apple Dot Mac service. Overall, it is a good service and we would like to recommend the following changes
1. We noticed some blips in the service in connecting with the mail over the 3 week test period. May need to solidify the servers a bit more.
2. The annual membership fee seems a bit expensive. Should probably be somewhere closer to $50 USD annually. It would still be a little more pricey than the Hotmail or Yahoo services, but worth the difference.
3. There doesn’t seem to be any way to edit picture sizes so items sent to the gallery cannot be reduced to smaller sizes. Microsoft has a good tool called Power Toys for Windows XP that we use a lot.
4. Let people send and receive from POP3 accounts (not just receive from an account and reply via a Dot Mac mail address). That would get more folks on your service.
5. Incorporate some Web 2.0 tools into the iWeb and website hosting side of the Dot Mac service. For example, Google Analytics tracking features, the ability to update the blogs from a browser (not just your computer and your iWeb application), and give better stats on who is looking at the site.
6. Most importantly, put more muscle into the support. You can get limited Dot Mac support through the Apple Care call centers, however they usually direct you to send email. It usually takes a few days to get a response back from their email support team.
Overall, the Dot Mac service is great. It is designed to work well with Macs, however they have done a good job making it work well with Windows platform giving you access to your files and your mail when you are out and about. It is a pity the owners of Hotmail don`t follow this example. You can`t even use your paid Hotmail on a Mac without a software download. Then again, since Vista seems to be a copy of OSX, I suppose they are watching in Redmond as they rolled out Windows Live.