Up to 10 Per Cent of Apple's MobileMe Mail was Lost

How big is one percent? If it's a surcharge on your restaurant check, not that much; if it's a point on your mortgage, ow. If it's a chunk of .Mac/MobileMe email account holders who are left hanging for a week without access to their email... well, let's just say that anyone in that select and sorry lot who used a mac.com email address for professional or vital communications is justifiably furious right now.

Says Apple in its debut post, a particularly regretful loss was 10% of messages received through MobileMe between July 16 and July 18, a week after the product had been released. Problems over mail are said to have affected 1% of members. All in all, it will be several days before “restoration of full access for all…accounts” is completed.

Let’s face it, MobileMe’s first few days of life have been, well, difficult. It was problematic from the start, with the transition from .mac to MobileMe taking well over 24 hours, as opposed to the planned 6-hour outage. And when the web apps did go online, even though they were a step in the right direction, they were also slow and flaky at first.

I just read on Twitter that Apple is blogging – with Steve Jobs apparently asking one of his staff to post daily about the MobileMe debacle. I was about to welcome them in to the warm blogging waters but one thing is missing from this “blog” – no ability to comment.

Shame really as I’d love to see some of their customer comments – you can get a sense over at Engadget though.

As you know, restoring full email access to the remaining 1% of MobileMe users is our first priority. We turned on web access to their current email yesterday and the feedback has been cautiously positive. Since then, we've restored full email history (minus the approximately 10% of mail received between July 16 and July 18 which may have been lost) and the ability to access email from a Mac, PC and iPhone, to over 40% of these users, and expect the remainder to be restored in the next few days.