At the 2008 Worldwide Developers Conference in June, Apple's boss Steve Jobs said in San Francisco that the company's MobileMe service is allegedly "Exchange for the rest of us." Unfortunately, it has proved unreliable and I had myself problems getting through to its users, although most people are receiving some of the emails sent to them.

The problems come after a botched launch, when numerous users could not login while others, after managing to get past the first bumps, could not get their gadgets to sync properly. New subscribers have to pay $99 for a twelve-month plan but, because of the problematic start, the company said it would offer a free 30-day extension for the service.

The current problems which plague Apple's web services are related, apparently, only to incoming email. Sending stuff out seems to work. Apple has posted a damage control notice with the apparently false information that "1% of MobileMe members cannot access MobileMe Mail." In fact, this 1 percent seems to be much larger than the mathematical 1 percent. Maybe it's an Apple percent.

MobileMe tries to compete with similar services such as BlackBerry, but Apple has a very long way to go. I hope this redeems BlackBerry once for good as it makes clear that providing the kind of service they do, with the number of users involved and the excellent uptime, is quite awesome.

Meanwhile, Apple's MobileMe customers are mad as hell at the company and they let it all out on the company's forums. It appears that customer service is nearly impossible to reach, and the company did not answer requests for comments on the situation from prominent news sources.

It's unclear what happened to the emails which disappeared for the moment and did not reach the Apple-powered mailboxes. The worst part is that I got no error message for the stuff that I sent, which means for now there is no way to know what went through and, for Apple MobileMe users, it's impossible to know how many emails they lost.

Also, users started accusing Apple of false advertising by claiming they have "push" technology with their new service, which means nearly instant. Which it is not.