During MacWorld 2000, Apple launched iTools. The service came with an email account with a mac.com domain and 20MB of internet storage. Yay! All this was for free? Awesome! So stevelam@mac.com was born. That has been my primary email address since that day.
Oh the prestige! Whereas everyone was winbloze at hotmail dot com or averagejoe at yahoo dot com, mine was stevelam at mac dot com. When folks asked for my email address, I would answer them with great pride. “Oh, you use a mac?” Of course.
Then two years later, Apple launched .mac and begin to phase out iTools. .mac was unfortunately not free. The introductory offer was reasonable enough, so I stayed for another two years.
My account was expiring this week and I no longer wanted to renew. The features were not enough to justify the cost. I needed more than just a storage upgrade. Having blogging features like typepad would’ve been great.
Like many, I would gladly signup for an email only account, if they had one. Alas, they do not. I will surely miss my email address.
I think that .mac should just have a customized wordpress for thier “blog” feature if they ever make one…
I totally agree. I kept sending them feedback about adding a blog software like wordpress. It would also be awesome if you can host your domain with your .mac account. I really miss using iDisk.
<p>stevelam@mac.com is pretty cool but surely steve@stevelam.org is much better?</p>
<p>Why don’t you just use your domain’s email?</p>
I have several domains, and would always choose to use my .mac email address, because it’s just so elite and snooty; I love it.
Apple, unfortunately, will never offer wordpress-like blogging because Apple is focussing on Mac-enabled publishing: all of their web publishing features force folks to rely on iPhoto for galleries, iWeb for blogging, GarageBand for podcasting…
Doing this enables them to provide a greater sense of value to their desktop products and to enourage developers to create little gems like StickyBrain and ComicLife that can integrate with .Mac by the simple virtue of proprietary transfer protocols.
Granted, these tools are limiting for more experienced folk – iWeb’s blog, for example, has no comment feature and a highly limited feature set, as well as relying on Apple-designed templates, but eh… .mac isn’t really aimed at more experienced folk.
Still, I find the $69/year (always buy the day after Thanksgiving) perfectly acceptible for an email address I like with less-than-powerful but very clean GUI webmail, iDisk, and the AddressBook and Safari Bookmark syncronization.
I entered my link address wrong before, by the way. Whomever runs that site is not me, and would probably not appreciate me taking inadvertant credit for their site.