.Mac account?

Hi,

Is there any real benefits of opening a .mac account?

I would like to sync my email with my Mail app but my hotmail account won't do it. Am I best off paying for a proper hotmail account or .mac?

Any help will be appreciated.

Neither, get a free Gmail account that will probably offer more than either service.

Paying for email doesn't make sense unless you're either getting a personalized domain name or something above and beyond what free email services offer.

With Hotmail, you're paying for features (mainly POP access) that nearly everyone else offers for fre.

With .mac you're mainly paying for the other .mac services, which you may or may not need. Either way, you're tying yourself into yearly $99 payments which is a fair amount unless you really plan on using the other services as well.

Gmail offers tons of storage, a great web client, free POP & IMAP support as well as support for collecting mails from other accounts and multiple addresses.

I really don't see the value overall. As someone with two Macs, I thought it would be great for syncing, and it did work quite nicely, but since my trial membership has expired, I have found other ways to achieve the same result. In the end, if you have to argue with yourself as to whether the $99 is worth it, it likely isn't. The value should be obvious if it is there. If it isn't obvious to you, don't go for it.

httpmail is a plugin available that allows hotmail to work with apples mail program check it out. My wife refuses to switch to gmail from hotmail so I found this plugin for her macbook and it works.

I can't speak for everyone but I've been a .Mac subscriber for a little over year and it's worth it to me because of iDisk, IMAP e-mail, and the integration w/ iPhoto.

I started using .Mac mail b/c Yahoo mail was (and still is) having issues... I was getting e-mails bounced back and so was my g/f's Yahoo account. PLus, their POP server is garbage and will send back "invalid password" errors randomly.

Gmail has an excellent POP and IMAP server; however, I feel that Gmail has some privacy implications so I've been hesitant to use it as my primary account.

I happen to like .Mac e-mail but their webmail has some bugs in it (primarily w/ Junk filtering and printing). Apparently they are aware of it and working on it, but when a fix comes along is anyones' guess. On the whole, they have the highest uptime I've experienced and it's been pretty reliable.