Finally .Mac and Spotlight Come Together

I'm a big fan of my .mac account. Yeah, I know, it's a lot of money to pay for a vanity email address when you can get them for free all over the web. And I also realize the free ones frequently come with larger storage space. Yeah, I've got my gig-sized Yahoo and Gmail accounts but something skeeves me about the latter scanning my messages to target their ads to me.

But despite the "free" stuff, there are limitations that don't work well for me. I want to be able to use a desktop email client because searching, opening multiple messages (and composing multiples as well), and overall presentation don't cut it on web-only mail. And while Gmail gives you POP access for free (Yahoo only provides it for Plus customers), neither service has IMAP. That's a key for me since I have at least 3 places where I check my email regularly. I'll pony up the $100 per year so I can get to my mail using Mac mail or Outlook.

But my big problem with .Mac was storage... It's good to clear our mailbox out, saving those attachments out to your computer for instance. However it defeats the purpose of IMAP and limits the effectiveness of Spotlight (since I have 2 macs with different data sets on each). But thankfully I got the following email from Apple last week:

Dear .Mac Member,

.Mac membership now comes with 1 GB of combined .Mac Mail and iDisk storage and monthly data transfer limits have been increased to 10 GB. We have already updated your account. You can use your Account Settings to take advantage of .Mac's storage flexibility and reallocate storage to best fit the way you use the service.

In addition, .Mac is now available in French and German as well as in English and Japanese. You'll also find that .Mac now includes new Backup 3 software and the ability to create .Mac Groups.

We value your membership and hope you enjoy these enhancements to your .Mac service.

Way to increase value, Apple. Kudos for helping make me a more effective emailer...