As MobileMe Access Returns, Apple Says Some Mail May Be Lost Forever

Apple has announced that MobileMe access is slowly returning after a week long outage for a reported 1 percent of customers.

Customers began reporting they could no longer access their MobileMe accounts in the afternoon of Thursday the 17th of June. The outage lasted from the 17th to Friday the 25th at 10pm PDT and users received little or no explanation for why they could not send or receive mail or even access their MobileMe account.

At 6pm (PDT) Saturday, Apple updated the MobileMe support website, which for over a week had shown the same status message (that is that 1 percent of users were affected and Apple was doing everything it could to rectify the problem). The updated status reassured customers that access was currently being restored, however it also warned that some mail may have been lost during the last week or so.

“As a first step toward restoring service, we restored web access to a portion of your MobileMe Mail account. You can now log into me.com, and use the Mail web application to access all the messages you have received since the July 18 service outage. You can also compose, send, and receive new messages as normal. Please note that this interim solution does not provide access to any email messages received or saved before the outage began on July 18.”

The support page also details some functions users should avoid until the service is fully restored. Doing any of the following may cause problems that affected customers don’t want to run into after enduring a week of no access to their mail. Password changes, creating or altering any existing MobileMe email aliases or changing MobileMe storage allocation could, could provoke further interruptions of the MobileMe service, bounced messages or failed storage allocation adjustments.

Apple said users who access mail using a desktop mail client such as Mail, Outlook, Outlook Express, or Windows Mail along with Time Machine or (a similar form of back up) may be able to recover lost mail. However, for users relying exclusively on me.com the story is a little bit bleaker.

“There’s nothing for you to do. Your account will be restored, but you will not be able to retrieve any messages that may have been lost from your account.”

Apple has said it will update the support pages as soon as more information becomes available. We have yet to hear back from Apple with regard to what caused the problem so other that what’s posted on the site (“a serious issue with one of our mail servers”), there’s very little information to go on.

Click here to go straight to the MobileMe support page.