All new Macs come with a 60-day .Mac (referred to here as dotMac for readability) free trial account. After the trial period, dotMac will charge you USD99 annually. Now, this is where a lot of new (and even old) users have a difficult time deciding on whether to renew their subscription or not. Today, I will present some of the dotMac advantages that made me renew my account for another year - and even better, I bought a 5-user Family Pack instead of the single account subscription.
One of the obvious advantages of having a doctMac account is the e- mail service. Having a @mac.com e-mail address comes with advantages over the free e-mail accounts such as Yahoo! and Google's Gmail. dotMac e-mail has both an IMAP services as well as a web-based service. It interfaces perfectly with your Mac's Mail.app software. With 1GB of space available, it surely is competitive - it should be, considering that you paid for it. However, I am still hoping that Apple will increase this to 2-3GB per user.
In addition to your usual web-based access and IMAP service, dotMac e- mail service allows you to create up to 5 e-mail aliases that you can use. I use this feature to create e-mail aliases for web-site registration. Once I get spammed by a particular site using that address, I can easily disable it and create another e-mail alias. This allows me to cloak my main dotMac e-mail address.
Having a dotMac e-mail address also provides you with an iChat account. Although iChat supports both dotMac and AIM accounts, having a dotMac account comes with an added feature of encrypted-IM exchange. iChat now supports encrypted chat sessions with a valid dotMac account. So, instead of paying additional for PGP Home or using the free GPG alternative (which quite complicated for ordinary users to install), encrypted iChat sessions is quick and painless - just tick a box and that is it. If you do not have a valid dotMac account but you have registered for the 60-day trial, that dotMac username is still valid for your iChat sessions.
Another popular dotMac service is the iDisk - an online web-based drive. Mounting this drive is similar to mounting any network-drives on your LAN. The speed of access and transfer is dependent on the speed of your internet connection. Your iDisk storage space, however, is shared with your e-Mail space. An interface allows you to divide your 1GB space between your iDisk and e-mail storage.
iDisk also allows you to host your blog, web-site, photo and video gallery. In addition, you can simply use it to share files between your peers. The integration with iLife is simply amazing! Makes your life simple, which is what the Mac is all about. :)
dotMac also provides an online address book and calendar. Although you can get free online alternatives to these services such as planzo.com's calendar services, the tight integration of these services with your Mac's addressbook.app and ical makes it worth the price. To add to its value, if you have a PDA or a supported mobile phone, syncing your addressbook and calendar between your Mac and your device and a web-based service is only a click of a button away.
Subscribers also get free software from Apple every now and then. You get a Backup application that features online back-up services using your iDisk. Apple used to give-away Virex just so your can protect your Mac from sending viruses, worms and trojans that only infect Windows-based computers anyway (don't worry, your Mac rarely gets infected). Currently, subscribers get free Garageband loops and exclusive trial-versions of some third-party applications.
A new feature to dotMac services is the groups or mailing list. This is similar to Yahoo! groups but has less features and also dependent on your 1GB space. Until Apple provides a separate storage space (for free) for your groups and add more functionality, I recommend sticking with Yahoo! Groups.
Obviously, there are free alternatives to the dotMac services. Bottom- line is, if you are looking for a service that is fully integrated with your Mac applications such as Mail.app, Safari (for your bookmarks), iCal, iLife suite, Addressbook and a whole lot of other third party applications, then the USD99 subscription fee is well worth every penny. So, if you are convinced that it is worth the investment, go call your Mac reseller - I frequent the Apple Center in SM North (see Nor), Ynzal (Portia Paras), Liteware (Joan Naranjo) as well as Accent Micro SM North branch - I also call LMK (Cherrie Pinpin and Kajal Ramchandani).
