How I use .mac

This articles goes with my Do it Yourself .mac page.

Mail: I have discontinued using .mac mail because of inadequate spam filtering. When I was using it, about 80% of the spam in my in-box arrived via .mac account. I have hotmail, yahoo, gmail, and several mailboxes I host using my own Mail::Toaster. .mac filtering is still way behind their competitors (most of which are FREE) in this regard. I hate spam, so getting rid of my .mac account (1 of 9 primary email accounts) is just another way to reduce the spam I see.

Address Book: I do not use .mac Address Book because I have an iPod and cell phone with that data in them. Also, I prefer not to publish the personal data of every person I know on any web site.

Homepage: I like the integration and ease of use but the limits are far too severe to be useful to me. My personal web site takes up 350 MB, mainly because of photo albums like Alaska that I publish. Some of my sites require database backends and other fun CGI stuff I can't do with .mac. Apple also has been know to shut down sites that exceed certain unpublished bandwidth threshholds. I'm not anxious to discover that my site is offline.

iCal publish & Sync: This is another cool feature of .mac.

iDisk: I regularly use my iDisk to toss files onto and then download them at a client site. However, this habit often costs me wasted time because access can be interminably slow. In the time it takes to download a 30MB file from my iDisk, I can drive home from anywhere in town, burn the file to a CD or store it on a USB flash drive, and drive back before the 30MB download is complete. Putting that same file on my WebDav enabled server takes seconds and I can download it on any broadband connection in just a few minutes.

Backup: I don't use Backup to my iDisk mainly because I don't trust others with my personal data. In order for me to consider using Backup, I'd insist on seeing my data encrypted as it passes across the internet and stored in an encrypted format such that it's technically not feasible for anyone to access my data without my private key. Also, 100MB is a good start, and a reasonable 1GB is $350/year. Did I mention how slow iDisk access is? For these reasons, Backup is next to useless to me in it's current form.

Bookmark Syncing: This is a very cool feature, and I use it. This feature keeps your bookmarks in sync on Safari on each mac that you use.

iSync: I use iSync to sync my Address Book and iCal calendars between multiple macs, my Palm, and iPod.

iCal: I like and use the iCal support for publishing my calendars and subscribing to my wife's. She also subscribes to mine, this is quite useful.

Misc: I never use the following features: iCards, Virex, Support. I do often download the freebies, and these are occasionally of some value.

Last modified on 2/8/06.