Techcrunch's Michael Arrington has pe ed an interesting piece on why the upcoming .Mac webmail revamp is so important. Be sure to check it out, but in summary: Michael believes the combination of a killer AJAX-infused webmail service that both allows users to manage multiple accounts and syncs with a desktop client will give A le a significant advantage and a eal over competing email services. Now, putting aside the fact that Gmail allows you to tra arently send and receive email from non-Gmail addre es, I agree with Michael and I'm pretty darn excited about the first .Mac webmail revamp since the stone ages. However, I think he's mi ing a major point that many others overlook when discu ing, praising or damning .Mac: it i 't webmail.
Or to be more ecific: it i 't just webmail. Michael compares .Mac webmail to competing offerings from Google and Yahoo! - individual and free webmail services that can integrate with other offerings from their re ective providers - or not. Google has their news, R reader (which just had a killer overhaul, by the way) and countle other sister products, just like Yahoo! has their own tool belt of web services. But the crucial fact here is that .Mac webmail is an unconditional component of a suite of products for which users have to pay a hefty yearly fee. You can't get .Mac webmail by itself, let alone for free, and while everyone is excited about the UI revamp (well, almost everyone), the mounting orchestra of criticism agai t .Mac still stands. The service overall, e ecially webmail, is sorely mi ing fundamental features that competing services have had for years, and our own Dave Caolo nailed one of the most significant on the head in his eulogy for .Mac: server side am filtering. .Mac doe 't feature it, but it's become a standard (as in: four-wheels-on-a-car standard) with virtually any other service, webmail, POP or otherwise.
[Update: A reader named 'random' pointed out that .Mac a arently does feature server-side am filtering, courtesy of Brightmail, as outlined in this su ort doc. While this is nice, it doe 't seem to work well (e ecially compared to the likes of Gmail and Yahoo!), and it doe 't allow users to adjust its se itivity or peruse server- ecified me ages as am in case some legitimate me ages are being inaccurately marked. In other words: it's terrible.]
Ste ing back from fundamentals and ecifics, however, I think Michael is placing a little too much hope in this .Mac webmail upgrade. I highly doubt it will rake in the new users, even with the unique abilities Michael hails. At best, I think it will serve as a very welcomed upgrade that could convince a good portion of existing users to go the 'eh, ok fine I'll renew' route for just one more year. Don't get me wrong: as a member myself, I'm welcoming the upgrade and I was pla ing on renewing in a month before I knew about the webmail refresh. I just don't believe an update to one (admittedly major) part of .Mac will hold that much weight with those who aren't interested in the entire retail package, e ecially when competing services can stack up pretty well for the general user, and keep $99 their pocket to boot.
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