For .Mac subscribers like myself (4 years and going strong!) I was pleasantly surprised by the new look and feel and functionality of .Mac webmail. Having logged in to Webmail for the first time in a good little while at the weekend I came across a whole new ans hiny interface. Drag and drop, flagging, preview panes and all the good stuff we’re used to in products from Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft.
Michael Arrington at TechCrunch regards this as being quite significant, and The Unofficial Apple Weblog have commented on Mr Arrington’s comments. Lets remember that .Mac has offered synchronisations of calendar, contacts, web favourites, computer settings and backup for a good while now. Ok it’s not free, but the service has always done good for me. I think improving the webmail client is a great move (being able to select multiple mails to drag and drop them to a new folder or delete them is a welcome addition) although the server side spam filtering has got to improve. Brightmail (the alleged spam tool used for .Mac webmail) really struggles with the current spate of image based spam.
So the email from the Apple team telling me of the upgrade went as follows:
Dear .Mac Member,
We’re pleased to inform you that we just launched a completely new version of .Mac webmail with a new interface and more advanced features. For more information and an overview of what’s new, click here. Or, simply log on to .Mac to start using the new service now.
We hope you like the new .Mac webmail. And thank you for being a .Mac customer.
Sincerely,
All of the AJAX style goodness is present, from auto-suggestion of address book entries, drag and drop mail items, no full screen refresh when deleting a mail, etc. But haven’t we had all of this in GoogleMail, Yahoo! Mail and Live Mail (let alone the corporate offering of Outlook Web Access) for, well… ages now? Well, yes. But Arrington’s comment is that Apple’s .Mac Webmail brings this capability and adds the factor of being able to read multiple mail accounts from the same single mail interface and synchronise it with your desktop based Apple Mail client. Is that really compelling? Maybe. Personally I don’t really find it a problem flitting netween GoogleMail to manage my online presence, .Mac webmail to manage personal mail and Live Mail to manage well, those people who I gave my Hotmail address to years ago (by far my oldest email account, maybe 10 or 11 years old). It’s not productive for me to jump out of one email client and then into another, but I do it so I can keep a grip of who is doing what in the email client space as much as managing my actual email.