The fee is US$99.95 per year, and as a thank you for being loyal customers, existing iTools members can reserve a first year special offer of $49.95. iTools members will have until September 30 to join .Mac. After this time, original iTools accounts will be deactivated.

Yow! that hurts!

Pay up or else... I've got 60 days to clear my iDesk and delete my most pristigious email address on the Internet.

Yowsa! and you can't even pay monthly! Geeze, even a Superfan account is more flexible.

I wouldn't mind knowing if the bandwidth restrictions will be lifted when you're paying for the stuff. If not, my current ISP works out cheaper for that sort of storage and email. (and I get an actual ISP)

snaggy: thinking about branching into web services? how about geekDisk, geekTunes and geekMovie?

------------------
The frightening thing is not dying/The frightening thing is not living--T-Bone Burnett

hahaha
no offense intended, i know you wouldn't do something so exploitive, but the concept is an interesting one...

http://www.mac.com

I think its worth it...

First, it appears that if you have a friend or family member with a full .mac account, you can have a free email only account.

quote:

---

http://help.apple.com/mac/5/help/mail/pgs/mac43.htm

Converting your .Mac trial account to an email-only account

IMPORTANT: If you want to convert your .Mac trial account to an email-only account, you cannot do this directly. You must have a full .Mac member, who has purchased an additional email-only account, include your converted account as part of their membership. Once your trial account has been converted, all your data files (except for your email messages) will be removed from Apple's servers. Other .Mac services, such as iDisk, HomePage, Backup, and Virex, are not accessible to email-only accounts.

To convert someone else's trial account to email-only, you must be a full .Mac member who has purchased an additional email-only account. Go to www.mac.com, click Account in the .Mac menu bar, then click the Email Account Management button. Enter the member name and password of the trial account you want to convert, then click Convert.

---

I read along the way somewhere that you can have 10 free email addresses attached to a full account. So those of us with 4 or 5 mac.com accounts can get 1 full dotMac account, and link up the others as email only. This seems fair.

----

Second, maybe some generous .Mac full users can donate some of their free email addresses to those less fortunate that want to keep their 'prestegiou$' mac.com address. I'd be willing to donate a couple slots after I get all mine straightened out.

Third, my personal opinion is that Apple can do whatever they want. They have real costs in running mac.com and I don't think that $8 a month is going to break most .Mac users. Demographically, Mac users tend to be in upper income brackets anyway, at least according to Apple's figures (that's why they only open Apple Stores in high-rent areas). They're adding new features to dotMac and the increased the storage space significantly (figuring on all the mac.com people that would drop out?), so sign me up, again.

=bd

I LOVED having a mac.com email address. I hate that I have to give it up. But in the post 9/11 economy, there are a lot of people who no longer have disposable income to frivilously throw around and I am one of them. With all the corruption in the financial world, and the lingering threat of more terrorist attacks, this is not something that is likely to change significantly in the immediate future. I'm looking at the real possibility of having to dump my DSL service because I can barely pay my rent as a result of not being able to get a job I didn't need until this year and my husband being laid off and unable to get steady work since Jan. I certainly don't have an extra $50-100 to lay out over and above my ISP for email service!

Besides that, the only feature of iTools I used was my mac.com email address, and I picked that up from my destop email client! Yeah... I played around with iDisk a couple of times, but just really didn't have any use for it. My ISP offers as much webspace as I'll need any time soon, and I back up my HD on CDs, and I can access and transfer stuff between my PB and my iMac from my network, so I, personally, never really saw much need for any of the other features of iTools. I suspect there are quite a few others who could probably say the same.

I completely understand Apple charging for homepage storage and the geeky-stuff that the more tech-savvy-poweruser type might want. I think its awesome that they are offering Mac-specific features such as .Mac offers and will be offering. I recognize such advanced computing features require more expense, maintenance, R&D, etc, to keep running smoothly and stay cutting-edge.

But what about the rest of us? Wasn't the Macintosh originally promoted as "the computer for the rest of us"? I'd love to have more time to invest in learning and setting up and using the other features of .Mac, but the fact is, going to school full-time, I barely have time for my email and Quicken and the wordprocessing I need to do. All *I* really want and need is my mac.com email address and 3-5 mgs of storage space to hold incoming email until I download it to my puter... in case I go on vacation or something. Why can't we have one free mac.com email address for each family member that wants one, or even for a yearly fee of $5-$10 per email address... and then opt in for other .Mac features we might have use for as we want to expand our computing experiences? Why couldn't there be an ala carte menu for other features/services and maybe one or two packaged sets of features to choose from? WHY does it have to be all or nothing???

What happened to the "more choices" mentality that has kept me in the Mac camp so long? Has Jobs been spending too much time with Gates??? Did Gates install an MS worm at Apple headquarters sometime during his five year partnership??? Was that just a ruse to install a Trojan Horse at Cupertino??? This is the kind of thing I've come to expect from the Windoze world... NOT from Apple.

I know we fight for every % of marketshare we can get, but this ain't the way to keep or get customers! And it makes it all that much harder for me to sell my Windoze friends on a Mac! Even Microsoft offers HotMail... which ain't even all that hot!

Geesh... even *I* find myself thinking... If there was any other viable alternative to Apple... *other* than Windozes... I might find myself investigating my options. I'm not impressed with Linux, either, so I'll stay true to Apple... but if they keep doing bonehead things like this, maybe I'll just have to banish computing from my life altogether. G-d knows I'd have a lot more disposable income if I did...

Disappointed in Cupertino once again...