Personal domains with .Mac mail?

On Aug 10, 2007, at 4:43 AM, Nik Friedman TeBockhorst wrote:

> Does anyone know if you can use a custom domain name on Mac.com
> <http://Mac.com> for email, or is it only for websites?

The short answer is 'no.'

Apple is just making it more convenient for people who want a
personal domain name, say they purchase it at a place like GoDaddy,
which will do domain mail for them, and instead of using GoDaddy's
cookie-cutter approach to domain hosting (for additional fees), they
can simply point their domain's web space to mac.com. For someone
like myself with dedicated servers, it is a nice touch to be able to,
for example, allow a photo album to be pointed to by a subdomain that
is handled as a cname by mac.com rather than attempting to wrap the
mac.com gallery inside a remote server's web space. Apple is giving a
slightly more elegant way to handle some of these kinds of things.

Jeffrey

I don't believe mac.com will handle PHP, mySQL and similar web hosting
tools. Assuming that is still true, I don't see how it can compete.

> Apple is just making it more convenient for people who want a
> personal domain name, say they purchase it at a place like GoDaddy,
> which will do domain mail for them, and instead of using GoDaddy's
> cookie-cutter approach to domain hosting (for additional fees), they
> can simply point their domain's web space to mac.com. For someone
> like myself with dedicated servers, it is a nice touch to be able to,
> for example, allow a photo album to be pointed to by a subdomain that
> is handled as a cname by mac.com rather than attempting to wrap the
> mac.com gallery inside a remote server's web space. Apple is giving a
> slightly more elegant way to handle some of these kinds of things.

Dreamhost gives you more space & bandwidth, you can have unlimited
domains, and they support PHP & MySQL, unlike .Mac, so you can use
real blogging software like WordPress on it. Flickr is also a lot
better than .Mac for photo storage.

As you can tell, I'm pretty sour on .Mac. I was hoping they'd switch
to a rebranded Gmail service so .Mac mail would finally have decent
spam filtering. The only thing I use .Mac for is syncing my Macs (and
as my Apple ID for the Apple & iTunes stores). If I didn't need .Mac
for those two things, I wouldn't use it.

Is SyncTogether any good as a .Mac sync substitute? Is it possible to
still use my Apple store account if I don't have a .Mac account?

On Aug 11, 2007, at 1:47 AM, Hudson Barton wrote:

> I don't believe mac.com will handle PHP, mySQL and similar web hosting
> tools. Assuming that is still true, I don't see how it can compete.

For one who has never written a line of PHP code, and whose closed
approach to PHP code is to read the endless security bulletins about
grossly faulty PHP code, .mac doesn't have to compete with a PHP
offering for my "business". But then, I don't have a blog and don't
expect to. I don't create podcasts, and don't expect to. I have the
same two photos (of the cat Tidbits) at .mac that I've had there for
6 years.

   --John

--On August 11, 2007 1:47:15 AM -0700 Hudson Barton <hhbvglimfeather.com>
wrote:

> I don't believe mac.com will handle PHP, mySQL and similar web hosting
> tools. Assuming that is still true, I don't see how it can compete.

.Mac's goal isn't to compete with web hosting companies. It competes with
the free web page hosting sites like geocities, and to a limited degree
MySpace and Facebook (without the social networking aspects.)

PHP, MySQL and such are typically used for content management on web sites.
Apple's view is that the Mac is content management system and the web site
is just the viewer.

The downside is that the cost .Mac prevents it from competing with the free
sites. You can get a real web host, not use PHP or MySQL and still come out
cheaper....

Kevin

On Aug 11, 2007, at 1:47 AM, Mike Cohen wrote:

> As you can tell, I'm pretty sour on .Mac. I was hoping they'd switch
> to a rebranded Gmail service so .Mac mail would finally have decent
> spam filtering.

The .Mac upgrades were underwhelming at best. It's nice to have more
storage, but Apple's servers are still terribly slow. Still, I'd have
hated it if Apple switched to Gmail, mainly because Gmail doesn't
provide IMAP access. I also don't care for its webmail client.

> Is it possible to still use my Apple store account if I don't have
> a .Mac account?

Yes, your .Mac user name remains usable as your Apple ID for iChat,
iTunes, the Apple Store, etc., even if you let your .Mac account lapse.

> Is SyncTogether any good as a .Mac sync substitute? Is it possible to

SyncTogether works quite well. While it was free, I used it to keep my
Macs in sync by keeping my old G4 linked up to the internet at all
times as a central sync site.

I also use ChronoSync to keep a folder on my Mac sync'd up with WebDAV
space on DreamHost. It works fantastically for me.

--
--Nik (nikinik.net)

Get your geek on at www.inik.net and notions.inik.net!

On 11-Aug-2007, at 02:47, Hudson Barton wrote:
> I don't believe mac.com will handle PHP, mySQL and similar web hosting
> tools. Assuming that is still true, I don't see how it can compete.

Because 99.99999999999% of home users who want to post family
pictures on the web for Grandma to see not only don't need php or
mysql, they don't even know what they are, and wouldn't understand if
you spent a week explaining it.

OK, I may have gone slightly overboard on the precision there...
99.999%?

>>I don't believe mac.com will handle PHP, mySQL and similar web hosting
>>tools. Assuming that is still true, I don't see how it can compete.
>
>Because 99.99999999999% of home users who want to post family
>pictures on the web for Grandma to see not only don't need php or
>mysql, they don't even know what they are, and wouldn't understand if
>you spent a week explaining it.

The "home user" does not have to "know" what PHP and mysql is. Most
hosting sites provide plug&play utilities for things like blog
comments and email responses in questionnaires. These are very
normal things that even amateur bloggers simply require, and Dotmac
because it doesn't offer these tools is still uncompetitive. It
claims to be a full featured site for blog hosting, but that is a
false claim.


H.

On Aug 20, 2007, at 4:10 AM, Google Kreme wrote:

> On 11-Aug-2007, at 02:47, Hudson Barton wrote:
>> I don't believe mac.com will handle PHP, mySQL and similar web
>> hosting
>> tools. Assuming that is still true, I don't see how it can compete.
>
> Because 99.99999999999% of home users who want to post family
> pictures on the web for Grandma to see not only don't need php or
> mysql, they don't even know what they are, and wouldn't understand if
> you spent a week explaining it.

And would create security problems if they tried it. The pros do
enough of that with PHP (as of several months ago, none of the
available PHP-based AJAX frameworks protected against both cross-site-
scripting and SQL injection--several protected against one or the
other).

   --John

> The "home user" does not have to "know" what PHP and mysql is. Most
> hosting sites provide plug&play utilities for things like blog
> comments and email responses in questionnaires. These are very
> normal things that even amateur bloggers simply require, and Dotmac
> because it doesn't offer these tools is still uncompetitive. It
> claims to be a full featured site for blog hosting, but that is a
> false claim.

Only if you make PHP and MySQL a requirement for blogging. That is of course
a fallacy, since there's nothing in a blog that requires that. Andy
Ihnatko's blog is pretty much all AppleScript. The idea that full featured
blog hosting requires the full feature set of Wordpress or Movable Type is
silly.

--
John C. Welch