Apple: MobileMe on the mend, but some mail lost forever

The unlucky one percent of MobileMe subscribers who've been without e-mail for more than a week are slowly getting their accounts restored, although some messages have apparently been lost permanently, according to Apple's just-launched MobileMe "Status" blog.

Computerworld reports that the blog—an unusual move for Apple, which is notorious for its secrecy—went live late Friday. Apple had previously apologized via e-mail and granted users a month's free MobileMe service.

In Friday's first, un-bylined blog post, an Apple employee wrote: "Steve Jobs has asked me to write a posting every other day or so to let everyone know what's happening with MobileMe."

The employee admits that "it's been a rocky road and we know the pain some people have been suffering," and promises that engineers "are working 24-7 to improve matters."

Indeed, there have been some modest improvements. According to a second blog post, dated Sunday the 27th, e-mail access has been restored to about 40 percent of those MobileMe subscribers who'd been locked out of their accounts.

Unfortunately, most of those subscribers can only check messages that were received after July 18, when the outage first began. And while Apple promises that access will eventually be restored to "the vast majority" of old e-mail messages, it warns that about 10 percent of messages received between 5 a.m. PST on July 16 and 10:20 a.m. PST July 18 "have been lost."

In another glitch, any MobileMe messages received between July 18 and 22 have a July 23 date stamp, although you can pull up the long header for any individual message to see when it was actually received.

In Apple's MobileMe support forums, users are reporting that they're finally getting Web access to their Me.com mail, but some of those facing the prospect of lost e-mail messages are looking for more than status updates.

"I still believe that a compensation should be provided ... my thought is that an iPhone 3G and a year of service (MobileMe) extension should be welcomed by users," one poster wrote.

Related:
Apple restores partial access to MobileMe e-mail, admits messages lost [Computerworld]