At the end of last week, MobileMe subscribers began to experience problems sending mail. Complaints varied from being able to receive mail, but not send anything to not being able to do either. There were also a significant amount of people who said access to their mail was sporadic and often sluggish. These problems began on Thursday afternoon and many users said that yesterday after nearly five days of outage, their account activities had yet to return to normal.

At the time of print, the status message on the MobileMe support page read,

“1% of MobileMe members cannot access MobileMe Mail. Service will be restored ASAP. We apologize for any inconvenience.”

While Apple says only 1 percent of subscribers are suffering, those that are (who have taken to calling themselves 1%ers), seemed to have arrived at the conclusion that 1 percent is a little optimistic and that in reality, many more customers are affected by these outages.

For Apple and its customers, the transition to MobileMe has been rocky to say the least. Over the last week or so there’s been apologies from the MobileMe team for various different lumps and bumps in the road. Unfortunately these apologies seem to fall just short of the the mark every time and neglect to explain other problems plaguing the user.

Initially there was the issue of Apple using the term “push” to describe everything under the MobileMe umbrella. Apple apologised for this last week and said the company would no longer be using the word push until syncing with Macs and PCs was near instantaneous. Apple then gave all current subscribers 30 days free to thank them for their patience and support.

However, at the time, Apple customers had all but left those woes behind and replaced them with the fact that several of the web apps didn’t work properly and they were being charged for their supposedly free trial. Customers had been kicking up a fuss about the charges for several days yet there was no mention of the charges in the open email to users, although Apple did say the web apps were working up and running properly.

Yesterday, Apple finally announced it would be giving another free month to customers who’d accidentally been charged upon registration and explained not only what had gone wrong, but detailed what Apple was going to do about it.

"Typically when you create a new trial account, your credit or debit card is verified by authorizing a small charge (equivalent to USD $1). Unfortunately, an error caused the incorrect amount to be preauthorized for your card. Be assured that this is not a charge, but only an authorization hold. The hold is released by the card-issuing bank after a predetermined period, usually between a week and a month. Where possible, Apple is working to have these holds removed earlier."

It’s been roughly five days since the outages began. Any bets for when we’ll get an explanation or a fix? Answers on the back of a postcard to the usual address.