Fast One from Apple

Comes in the e-mail from Apple Corp this little notice:

As a thank you for being a former MobileMe member, you received a 20 GB complimentary storage upgrade when you moved to iCloud. Your upgrade has expired.

Your iCloud storage has been automatically adjusted to the free 5 GB plan. You are currently using 1 GB of storage.

For more information, see this article.

The iCloud Team

Heh. Isn’t that cute?

What happened was that when they created the rather useless iCloud (if you want to store your photos there, I’m sure it’s very nice — but I don’t) (want to, that is), they took away the free storage space that came with MacMail.

Naturally, no one was interested in paying Apple for e-mail space when Google gives wads of it away for free. So to entice people to join up, they made a “complimentary” offer of free space. Then they urged everyone to automatically store all their iPhoto images in this space. Those of us who use Apple’s word processor and spreadsheet could also store those files there — the thing isn’t compatible, though, with the industry standard, Microsoft.

While 20 gigs sounds like a lot, it’s not as much as you might think if you don’t clean out your e-mail in-box fairly often — especially if you have friends who insist on sending you forwarded-forwarded-forwarded junk containing images, no matter how many times you ask them to quit it. My Mac mail, which also fields messages from three g-mail accounts, is set to automatically route messages come from Facebook, the neighborhood association, a Linked-in discussion group, Amazon Associates, and various businesses and individuals that keep spamming me directly into the trash.

Sixty unread messages are in the trash this morning; four on the Mac account. When you open a message on the Mac server, it doesn’t affect the incoming on the Copyeditor’s Desk partition, so you have to manually go in there and delete those — doubling your pointing and clicking for that task, to say nothing of doubling the number of  judgment calls about which messages really should be saved. Seventy unread messages reside there. MacMail doesn’t count “sent” messages, but since those date back to the beginning of May, I’d guess it’s probably several hundred.

Because of this steady, rather rapid accumulation, I actually have come up against that 20 gig ceiling. When that happens, Apple freezes your e-mail. Cute, eh?

And  5 gigs is only a quarter of 20 gigs… Right now, according to Apple, I’m 3.94 gigabytes remain of the 5 gigs.

One reason for the build-up is that I often need to find past e-mails, especially ones that I’ve sent to clients, and so I tend not to delete items from the “Sent” folder until I absolutely have to. And because of my innate laziness, I tend to forget to throw out the trash, too.

So this means I’m going to have to stay on top of cleaning out the mailboxes.

I figured the “complimentary” 20 gigs was a maneuver to get people to load images and documents on Apple’s server and then put them behind the barrel: pay up or lose your data. So I ignored their generous offer of “free” space for all my iPhoto images. As a result, the only thing that matters is my e-mail account: no photos, videos, or valued documents are up there.

 Still. Even though I won’t be seriously harmed if they jam up my e-mail — as long as the hang-up is temporary — something about it I don’t like. It just seems…sleazy.