To MobileMe or Not To MobileMe?

Update, Jan 2009: People looking for a MobileMe alternative might want to see my other blog post, MobileMe Alternatives.

(Note: I believe the following is correct as of mid-August 2008.  I may try to periodically update this as time permits, but it may not be accurate or useful much past this date.)

Given the current issues with MobileMe, I thought I’d make some suggestions.

With the iPhone, having push email, contacts, and calendars is extremely nice and desirable.  It’s very useful to have contacts and calendars updated without having to connect to iTunes. If your iPhone is lost or stolen, you can just get a new iPhone and easily restore your contacts/calendar.  MobileMe provides these features, but the current reliability and security leave much to be desired.  So, the question becomes, “Should I get MobileMe?”

It really depends upon one’s needs. Personally, I think it’s marginally worth it, if you think of MobileMe as only providing additional iPhone services. Look at it this way: for around $8.34/month, you get push email, contacts, and calendars (well, OK — when MobileMe is working), and synchronization between the iPhone and various PCs/Macs. Everything beyond this is gravy. Now there are “free” ways of getting most of this (see the end of this posting for details), but I don’t know of any other service that provides all this for around $8.34/month.

Now, compared to other email services, MobileMe mail is lacking in features, and it seems that the MobileMe mail has the greatest issues with availability. So why not use another, more full-featured email provider? Why not continue to use your regular email provider with MobileMe? You would use MobileMe for push contacts and calendars, but use your regular (non-MobileMe) email provider for email. On the iPhone, you would have two email accounts set up: your regular email account (for reading/writing all your email) and the MobileMe email account (used only to make noises to tell you of important/urgent email in your other email account — more on this, below).  This has many advantages:

1. This helps to isolate you from MobileMe issues.  If MobileMe goes down, your email is still accessible. Recently (August 2008), MobileMe’s uptime doesn’t seem to be very good. Of course, if MobileMe goes down, push email may not be working, but you should still be able to read your email, and that’s the important thing.
2. Increased security, if your email provider has it.  MobileMe does not use encryption (https) with many MobileMe web pages, like email.  This may not be important if you access MobileMe from home, but it can be an issue if you’re using your laptop at a public wifi point, and accessing MobileMe webmail; in this case, hackers could conceivably read your email.
3. If your provider supports it, server-side mail filtering can automatically sort, tag, and autoforward your incoming email.  MobileMe has no server-side filtering of any type.  Filtering is extremely useful, as you can use it to only autoforward important/urgent email to your MobileMe email account, which would cause your iPhone to make noises if you have push MobileMe email enabled.  Note that, for this case, you would still read/write email via your regular email provider (not MobileMe); MobileMe email would only be used to make noises on the iPhone, and you would just periodically delete all MobileMe email, without reading them.If you used only MobileMe mail, the push email would notify you of each and every received email.  Not only could this be very disruptive, but it also drains your iPhone’s battery.  By using a different email provider, you can selectively autoforward only important/urgent email.  Since you’re using a different email account for email, it doesn’t matter if only a few messages are forwarded to MobileMe mail, as you’re only using it to make noises, and will never read them.
4. Other email providers may have better search facilities.  MobileMe’s search is basic.

Google’s gmail has all of the above features, although there are others.  I use gmail because:

• gmail is free.
• gmail gives you an unlimited number of server-side rules, although there is a limit on the number of rules that can autoforward email. You can use powerful/advanced filter operators, too (it’s not documented well, but these operators go into the “Has the words:” filter field).
• gmail has IMAP access.  IMAP is a virtual necessity these days, because you can backup and restore your email using IMAP.  If gmail should suddenly lose all my email, I can put the email back onto Google’s servers using IMAP.  Also, with IMAP, I can transfer email from another (IMAP or POP3) account into my gmail account, which is very handy for migrating to gmail.  If I were using POP3, I couldn’t do any of this.
• gmail gives me access to powerful google search operators (which are the same as the above-mentioned filter operators).
• There are some very nice Firefox addons for the Google webmail interface, such as Better Gmail 2 and Remember the Milk for Gmail.

Also, by using MobileMe, I can use my desktop application to backup and restore my contacts and calendars information (in my case, I use outlook, although I’ve heard that ical and mail.app can be used with OS X). Furthermore, Google calendar sync is available: there are free programs that will sync one Google calendar, and commercial ones ($) to sync multiple calendars (sorry, I don’t know of any free programs that will sync multiple google calendars with desktop applications).

In short, the workflow goes like this:

• All mail is read/written via gmail (or some other, full-featured email provider).
• Important/urgent messages are autoforwarded to the MobileMe email account, to make noises on the iPhone.
• Once pushed to the iPhone, MobileMe mail is simply mass-deleted, without reading it.
• Contacts and calendars are edited via desktop applications. The web is not used, because MobileMe’s web pages tend to not use encryption, and because they might be buggy. A manual push can be done, here, to push out the information quicker.
• Desktop applications are used to backup contacts, calendars, and (possibly) email.

Alternatively, if you’re willing to live with limitations/fewer features, you don’t have to use MobileMe to get push (I have not verified these to see if they work):

• LifeHacker has an article on “Set Up Push Email, Contacts, and Calendar on Your iPhone for Free“. Outlook supposedly can’t be used, although you can supposedly pay money to make it work.
• Here’s a blog entry on “Using Google as a *free* MobileMe alternative (with push contacts & calendar)“. It appears that only one calendar can be used. Note that Google contacts requires that email addresses be unique across all contacts, and that there doesn’t seem to be a good way of backing up and restoring contacts (currently, importing google’s .csv contacts format doesn’t appear to always work correctly).
• I’ve heard that, if you pay for the commercial Yahoo email service, you get access to Yahoo push email. This, combined with a free push contacts/calendar service, might work as a low-cost MobileMe replacement. However, Yahoo’s answers site seems to have some complaints regarding the reliability of this, although the complaints seem old. Caveat Emptor.