MobileMe to iCloud.com Migration Questions

Thanks, but none of those answer my questions.

Thanks everyone for trying to help. Since I could not find the answers, I decided to be the guinea pig to help everyone who had these concerns by providing the answers. I crossed my fingers and made the move to iCloud.

BELOW ARE THE ANSWERS THAT APPLE FORGOT TO PROVIDE:

MobileMe Aliases 😐

If you had 5 aliases in MobileMe, all 5 will transfer over to iCloud.

However, if you delete any of them, you will no longer have the option to have 5, and will only have iCloud's 3.

I can live with that.

MobileMe SMTP (Send As) 😟

Unfortunatly, this feature is not in iCloud, so when you migrate, you lose all of your send as SMTP accounts and the abilitiy to add SMTP accounts. If you were using MobileMe to consolidate your personal and business accounts, wait as long as you can to migrate over to iCloud. Maybe Apple will add this feature back to iCloud before June of next year, but if they do not, you will have to use another email system with this feature, like Gmail.

MobileMe POP3 (Remote Mail Retrieval) 😢

Unfortunatly, this feature also did not make it to iCloud. iCloud has no options for remote mail retrieval, so all of my other POP3 accounts that MobileMe checked and imported for me are now gone.

I am not happy about this one and will have to use Gmail to check and import all of my other accounts.

However, there is still hope that Apple will add this feature back in the future since most email systems have this capability.

MobileMe Mail Storage Size 🙂

Some good news is that if you had paid storage in MobileMe, you get the equilivant paid storage in iCloud without having to pay again until next June. Since I had the 60 GB MobileMe plan, I was automatically upgraded to the iCloud 50 GB (55 GB total) plan at no additional charge for 1 year. My MobileMe remaining apps (iDisk and Gallery) still have access to my 60 GB MobileMe storage until the big shutdown on June 2012.

I really liked the looks and clean feel of MobileMe and iCloud is even nicer. However, when Apple was cleaning up MobileMe and turning it into iCloud, they seem to have forgotten a couple of features. While I will continue to use iCloud, those 2 features mentioned above will force me to switch back to using Gmail and my primary email account.

Two more related thoughts.

😢 APPLE PLEASE BRING iDISK AND GALLERY BACK!!!!

I know that Apple likes to force people to think differently and adopt new ways of accomplishing tasks, but if Apple is going to do this, they need to do it right.

ℹ iDisk

The only way I can live without iDisk is for Apple to provide web access and desktop access to the files that are being synced with iCloud. If Apple did this in a manner similar to iWork in iCloud.com, people could live without iDisk. If you could also access those files in folder style on your desktop like iDisk, that would work. The synced file system could first sort the files by App, then give access to them similar to Finder.

ℹ Gallery

Photo Stream is not a solution and offers no sharing or external feed display like Gallery did. I understand that many people are going to just switch to Facebook, Flickr, or Google Picasa, but we want an Apple product. Maybe if Apple added to Photo Stream an archive feature which allowed you to share archived photo albums, everyone who is losing MobileMe's Gallery will be happy.

😢 APPLE PLEASE TAKE MY SUGGESTIONS SERIOUSLY AND DON'T FORCE ME TO USE YOUR COMPETITOR'S PRODUCTS!!!!

David Bourne wrote:

So basically iCloud email is web access only? I hope that changes soon. That would mean the mail client on iOS or Mac would be useless for iCloud (me.com) mail accounts.Can't be right!!

No, iCloud is not web access only.

However, just like MobileMe, certain features and settings like the SMTP and POP3 features I was talking about can only be accessed through the iCloud website.

Of course, iCloud does not have the SMTP send as or POP3 remote retrival features, but other settings such as adding email aliases (you@me.com or youtwo@me.com) can only be done on icloud.com. Once you add them on icloud.com, the aliases will show up on your Mac, iPhone, iPad, etc..

Airsculpture wrote:

Can't seem to work out what happens to the existing Mobile Me galleries and how you would share your galleries in the future with family ( non apple users ) abroad ?

Unfortunatly, Apple has not provided a solution to this MobileMe feature with iCloud.

Photo Stream is not a solution and offers no sharing or external feed display like Gallery did. I understand that many people are going to just switch to Facebook, Flickr, or Google Picasa, but we want an Apple product. Maybe if Apple added to Photo Stream an archive feature which allowed you to share archived photo albums, everyone who is losing MobileMe's Gallery will be happy.