Apple Completes MobileMe Restoration And Fixes Yet Another Glitch

It seems Apple has finally gotten the ducks in line with regard to the whole MobileMe fiasco.

Apple posted a second and third update alongside Friday’s update that the company was currently restoring access for the 1 percent of users who’d been experiencing trouble with their accounts for an entire week.

The first update detailed that while customers would be able to retrieve emails sent during the outage, the fate of their emails between July 16 and 18 was still a little hazy. The company reported approximately 10 percent of mail sent between these dates is gone forever.

Update two appeared early on Sunday evening, describing feedback to the partial restoration of access as “cautiously positive.” According to David G (the poster of these refreshingly regular updates), at the time of posting, Apple had restored full email history (minus that 10 percent) and the ability to access email from a Mac, PC and iPhone to over 40 percent of affected users with the remainder to be restored shortly.

Last night, David G was back for update three in which he announced that Apple had completed the restoration of the Mail service to the full 1 percent of affected users “including historical messages.” We’re not quite sure whether this covers the 10 percent of lost emails or not, but we’ll check it out and let you know.

Update three also spilled the beans on a syncing bug that users discovered yesterday morning. The glitch caused contact and calendar data to not sync properly over-the-air with iPhones and iPod touch, and for some users, this caused their contact and calendar data to disappear from their devices (but not their computers or the MobileMe cloud). Apple reported that once this bug was fixed, the problem resolved itself for most users. The post also provides a link to instructions for users who are still affected by the bug. Short summary: Turn off device, turn on device, turn off syncing, turn on syncing.

David G noted in the first update on Friday night that Steve Jobs had asked him to write a posting roughly every second day to let keep users up to date with everything that’s happening with MobileMe. At the end of update three David said he’ll post again later this week, which leads us to believe that it’s not quite smooth sailing for MobileMe yet. The company has also set up temporary MobileMe chat support where distressed users can speak to a dedicated "MobileMe Mail specialist."