“Earlier this week Apple announced that a new version of webmail for Mac users is ‘coming soon.’ There was a bit of chatter about this around the blogosphere, with most people concluding that this fresh coat of paint on the inferior .mac product is a bit of a yawn,” Michael Arrington writes for Techcrunch.
“I agree that .mac is Apple’s most difficult to use product and needs a lot of work. However, I think that the changes are important for one reason: There are very few Ajax webmail services today that allow users to access multiple email accounts. .Mac will be one of them,” Arrington writes. “I believe webmail is the single most important application to show off the power of Ajax. The reason is that we spend an incredible amount of time on email every day – at least 3-4 hours per day for me. When we spend that much time doing something, even small increases in productivity make a large aggregate positive difference.”
“.Mac webmail will now have both multiple account access and rich Ajax features. Only Yahoo currently offers that. And since .Mac syncs with a desktop client (Yahoo doesn’t of course), it is a completely end-to-end solution. Until now, you had to be using exchange server and Outlook to have anything close to that,” Arrington writes. “This is an important move by Apple that gives its platform a new advantage over Windows Machines and any of the webmail services out there, including Gmail and Yahoo. I look forward to its launch.”
Full article here.
Related MacDailyNews article:
Apple teases new .Mac webmail coming soon with drag-and-drop, built-in Address Book, and more – September 27, 2006
I’ve used dotmac since its inception and primarily use it for the email, web serving and filesharing.
I never pay $100 for it. Just last week I renewed for $80 by buying it online. So for 7 bucks a month I get email and my web site hosted. The ease of use for mail, iWeb etc is well worth the cost. Sooner or later the allocation will increase, hopefully to 2 or 5 gigs next year.
The email syncing is very important for me and being able to get mail at work via the web is great. The new webmail will siginificantly improve the experience for me.
AFAIK yahoo used to be syncable with Entourage for a $20 fee, the main reason why I ended up using hotmail more, it synced for free.