This week we saw an unusual chatty Apple, if we consider the MobileMe service functionality problems. MobileMe had a rough start two weeks ago, when users reported issues with the “Internet service that takes the best of .Mac and more.”

Not only did Apple apologize last week, but it also offered customers a 30-day extension eligibility for their MobileMe subscription and promises to keep them updated about the repairing process, which they did.

“Be assured people here are working 24-7 to improve matters, and we're going to favor getting you new info hot off the presses even if we have to post corrections or further updates later,” Apple's blog said on Friday.

It appears that 1 percent of the MobileMe members reported a mail outage last Friday, when one of Apple's mail servers blocked their access to their MobileMe mail accounts. Apple reported fixing the problem, but unfortunately, the affected members will only be able to read mail they've received since last Friday, but not prior to that.

The company expects to restore full access to the accounts and estimated that it should take no longer than a week for that to happen. However, I appears that the affected users have lost 10 percent of their mail messages received between July 16 and July 18.

So what exactly happened on launch date? Apple blames more traffic than they had anticipated for the failure to access the web versions of the MobileMe applications – Mail, Contacts, Calendar, Gallery, iDisk.

However, “we've since added server capacity and tuned our software to scale better – i.e. behave more gracefully when traffic spikes.”

Overall, Apple reported 70 bugs fixed, including the one that prevented MobileMe IMAP mail folders from syncing correctly between the web app and Mac OS X Mail or Outlook. Further details are expected next week.