14 May, 2010

Apple has made available a beta trial of the online MobileMe Mail service which you can access at http://me.com if you are a MobileMe subscriber. This beta brings in some new features in their attempt to make their online Mail page more user friendly.

Some of the new features introduced include:

• Widescreen and compact views.
• Rules to keep your email organized everywhere.
• Single-click archiving.
• Formatting toolbar.
• Improved performance.
• Increased security with SSL

Wide, Compact or Classic?

As you can see on the right, there are three options available to view your mail – widescreen, compact and classic. The classic being the one that is how the Mail is pre-beta. However, my favourite is the widescreen mode which gives more space to display your email and still shows the available emails and various inboxes. As compared to the classic view, the widescreen and compact view gives you more space to display your content. With the email folders easily accessible on the left hand column in the widescreen mode, you can also easily manage your mails by allow you to drag/drop the emails into their folders easily.

Another new feature is the server-side rules to help you organise your emails. However the filter rules provided are basic in function. At this time, you can only Move an email to a folder, Trash it or Forward it to a designated address. Two features which I hope they will implement are the auto-completing of email addresses or use of wild cards to set the criteria for the rules and also the ability to apply the rules on current emails in your Inbox.

Like the rules, the other features (formatting, one-click archive etc) are basic in functionality as compared to the widely popular Gmail but at least we see something being done on MobileMe by Apple, maybe to prepare MobileMe for more wider usage?

MobileMe is available at the Apple Store at S$148 for a single license or S$228 for a family pack that gives one main account and 4 family accounts (see MobileMe pricing page) or you can take up 60 day trial to see how it will work for you.

Tags: mobileme