My enthusiasm for Apple’s MobileMe is waning rapidly. A few early outages are nothing unusual for a new service; but on Friday Apple admitted losing email:

One issue we encountered was a mail outage affecting 1% of our members . . . We particularly regret to report the loss in the affected accounts of approximately 10% of the messages received between July 16 and July 18.

Losing email is truly aggravating. The worst of it is not knowing what emails you have lost. It has not happened to me for a few years; but I recall sending desperate emails to my most significant contacts along the lines of “if you sent me an email yesterday please send it again.” That never looks good; and of course the email you really wanted might have been from the one person you didn’t think of, or had never heard from before.

It wouldn’t be so bad, except that people still tend to assume that emails are delivered. Usually they are; but it has never been a guaranteed service, and with all that spam sloshing about messages get missed with or without Apple’s efforts.

I expect Apple will fix it and MobileMe will be fine shortly; but with this and the recent security blunder the company’s cloud efforts have been rocky recently. Perhaps I’ll stick to Exchange after all.