khaosworks | Holding off on the e-mail

Holding off on the e-mail

Given the amount of protest and division among the Mac faithful regarding the new .Mac service, I'm holding off on switching to another POP mail service until I see if Apple is willing to offer any compromise positions, like say, a no-frills version of .Mac with only e-mail for free. So, for the moment, khaos@mac.com is still a viable address, but to be always sure of reaching me, send via khaos@tim.org as per usual.

Further updates on e-mail as warranted.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

For a start, there's this .Mac protest:

http://www.petitiononline.com/iTol/petition.html

a petition titled ".Mac Services Overpriced Concerns",

and then there's this .Mac protest protest:

http://www.petitiononline.com/MUAMW/

"Mac Users Against .Mac Whiners"

At time of writing, there's an order of magnitude more signatures on the first petition than on the second. No big surprise there. Newsflash: People want things for free. Film at 11. (Newsflash 2: TANSTAAFL. Webcast at 11:30.)

Of course, online petitions aren't worth the paper they're printed on, so none of the above makes the slightest bit of difference either way, other than as a mildly interesting demonstration of the "protest and division" within the ranks.

I really can see both sides of the issue. As I wrote to Apple, I don't begrudge them having to charge for .Mac services. However, I still feel the sense of being cheated as Apple did promise free e-mail for life with the mac.com account, and is now charging for services that I rarely, if ever used in the first place. If bandwidth is a problem, I'd gladly accept a no-frills service, no iDisk, no home page, no tech support, no filtering, no virus scan, just plain and simple e-mail at a 5 MB box for free, perhaps with an option for upgrading for new facilities for a fee. I don't think most people would actually whine too much about that. The reason I'm not signing either petition is that I think both positions ("I want all this and I want it free!" and "Oh, quit bitching and take it like a boy scout!") do not reflect my feelings on this.

I don't want .Mac for free. However, I'd like what Apple did promise - an e-mail mailbox free for the lifetime of the company.

> Apple did promise free e-mail for life with the mac.com account

Apple promised no such thing. This is a meme that is starting to be spread around by some of the users protesting against the .Mac fee. (It appears in the text of the ".Mac Services Overpriced Concerns", petition, for example.)

Contemporary reports of the January 2000 Macworld keynote (where iTools, including Mac.com, was first announced) all say nothing about Mac.com email service being "free for life". They don't even say anything about "for life" or "permanent". It reports the iTools as merely "free", as indeed they were then, and for the two and a half years following. But obviously, "free" is not the same as "free for life".

Sure, lots of people are upset. But part of that seems to be based on a naive assumption about something that was never made as a promise in the first place.

> If bandwidth is a problem, I'd gladly accept a no-frills service, no iDisk, no home page, no tech support, no filtering, no virus scan, just plain and simple e-mail at a 5 MB box for free, perhaps with an option for upgrading for new facilities for a fee.

It's possible that this could happen. Apple does have a history of backpedalling on unpopular policy decisions following an outpouring of outrage from its users. It's happened quite a few times already, often fairly quickly.

So Apple may well decide to break off a very basic Mac.com email service from the rest of the ~~iTools~~ .Mac services, for free or for cheap, if it gets a lot of requests for this specific change in their current policy.

It would be useful for users who agree with this to get together and organise the sending of this 'narrowly-targeted' request to Apple, through their own feedback channels. It might work, or it might not, but based on recent history, I think that there is a reasonable chance that it would be listened to and implemented.

Sure, lots of people are upset. But part of that seems to be based on a naive assumption about something that was never made as a promise in the first place.

The mac.com address itself was a big part of Apple marketing strategy, irrespective. Every Mac user gets one, it's exclusive to Mac users, and so on. It even asks you to sign up for it when you get a new Mac. iPhoto was marketed as free as well as the idea that you could put it up on your free iTools homepage. It may have been a naive assumption but Apple exploited that fully in its marketing, so to now come up and dump this on people, even at a reduced price of $50, seems a bit cold from the company that has benefited from it's "Not Microsoft" image.

I'm not that naive, and I am well aware of the realities of the situation that Apple can indeed charge for .Mac and it will. Even if they had shilled it as free for life (which I concede they didn't), the iTools sign-up small print clearly says that Apple reserves the right to charge for it in future, and that's what stands up as the correct agreement.

So Apple may well decide to break off a very basic Mac.com email service from the rest of the iTools .Mac services, for free or for cheap, if it gets a lot of requests for this specific change in their current policy.

Which is why I wrote to them through the .Mac feedback page directly suggesting this as a compromise position rather than sign any of the petitions.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Holding off on the e-mail

protest and division among the Mac faithful

Re: protest and division among the Mac faithful

Re: protest and division among the Mac faithful

Re: protest and division among the Mac faithful