After two weeks, Apple managed to restore access to 40 percent of the so-called 1 percent of users affected (that's an Apple percent, remember, not a mathematical percent, see below). The company finally has started to post updates on the situation after laying low at first. However, the company alleges that if you're one of these users, 10 percent of the email received during the outage was permanently lost.

The fact is that much more than 1 percent of MobileMe users were affected. I sent e-mail to several users and some did not get it, although they could access their account almost normally.

Apple previously worked on a shabby temporary solution which gave users the option of accessing their messages received since the July 18 service outage through a webmail application, but warned that users should not change their MobileMe password, create or change any MobileMe email aliases or change their MobileMe storage allocation while the problem is being worked on. Now, the access to accounts seems to be restored in part (40 Apple percent).

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. 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.

Meanwhile, it's appalling that Apple clings to that 1 percent. In fact, ZDNET reports that a poll at the Philadelphia PowerBook User Group (PPUG) this weekend indicated that the 1 percent is actually 25 percent, which amounts to 500,000 users.

The still-ongoing technical problems which affect Apple MobileMe users are once again a clear sign that the Cupertino company lacks the required expertise to develop and maintain such a service on its own.