Beautiful Day

MobileMe appears to be a fairly distributed system.

Mochi:~ samuel$ nslookup www.me.com
;; Got recursion not available from 10.0.0.10, trying next server
Server:     60.234.1.1
Address:    60.234.1.1#53

Non-authoritative answer:
www.me.com  canonical name = www.me.com.edgesuite.net.
www.me.com.edgesuite.net    canonical name = a1917.g.akamai.net.
Name:   a1917.g.akamai.net
Address: 202.147.3.10
Name:   a1917.g.akamai.net
Address: 202.147.3.11

This shows that they are using Akamai for managing their hosting requirements. This is typical of Apple and what they have done in the past - many of their services are managed by Akamai.

This may account for the kinds of problems people are having - for example, not everyone is affected. This may be because there are many different servers involved in handling connections and authentication. It is possible that only one, or a few servers are affected.

For MobileMe mail, which seems to be the biggest issue right now, we have two direct services: IMAP for downloading email, and SMTP for sending email. I’m not sure yet which services are affected - I just know that I can’t access the webmail and Mail.app also fails to connect to the account, prompting me for the password every time it tries to connect.

I’m going to look at IMAP first. I’m using the SSL connection to the IMAP server.

Mochi:~ samuel$ openssl s_client -connect mail.me.com:993
< ... snip a whole bunch of SSL junk ... >
---
* OK [CAPABILITY IMAP4 IMAP4rev1 ACL QUOTA LITERAL+ NAMESPACE UIDPLUS CHILDREN BINARY UNSELECT SORT LANGUAGE IDLE XSENDER X-NETSCAPE XSERVERINFO X-SUN-SORT X-SUN-IMAP X-ANNOTATEMORE X-UNAUTHENTICATE XUM1 AUTH=PLAIN] Messaging Multiplexor (Sun Java(tm) System Messaging Server 6.3-6.03 (built Jun  5 2008))
. login hidden@mac.com **********
. NO Internal authentication error

I tried several times. Using @mac.com and @me.com gave the same errors:

. login hidden@me.com **********
. NO Internal authentication error

I also get one other error message:

. login hidden@mac.com **********
. NO Remote authentication server unavailable

At one point, I did actually log in:

* OK [CAPABILITY IMAP4 IMAP4rev1 ACL QUOTA LITERAL+ NAMESPACE UIDPLUS CHILDREN BINARY UNSELECT SORT LANGUAGE IDLE XSENDER X-NETSCAPE XSERVERINFO X-SUN-SORT X-SUN-IMAP X-ANNOTATEMORE X-UNAUTHENTICATE XUM1 AUTH=PLAIN] Messaging Multiplexor (Sun Java(tm) System Messaging Server 6.3-6.03 (built Jun  5 2008))
. login hidden@mac.com **********
. OK User logged in
. list "" "*"
* LIST (\NoInferiors) "/" INBOX
* LIST (\HasNoChildren) "/" "Account Details"
* LIST (\HasNoChildren) "/" "Apple Mail To Do"
* LIST (\HasNoChildren) "/" "Deleted Messages"
* LIST (\HasNoChildren) "/" Drafts
* LIST (\HasNoChildren) "/" Invoices
* LIST (\HasNoChildren) "/" "Sent Messages"
. OK Completed
. select INBOX
* FLAGS (\Answered \Flagged \Draft \Deleted \Seen $NotJunk $Junk JunkRecorded $Forwarded NotJunk)
* OK [PERMANENTFLAGS (\Answered \Flagged \Draft \Deleted \Seen $NotJunk $Junk JunkRecorded $Forwarded NotJunk \*)]  
* 1401 EXISTS
* 0 RECENT
* OK [UIDVALIDITY 1150871245]  
* OK [UIDNEXT 1647]  
. OK [READ-WRITE] Completed

The count 1401 is correct. This is what Mail.app is showing for my offline inbox. Thus, I haven’t lost any email, it still appears to be there. However, what has been happening to mail sent in the last couple of days to my account? I’m sending an email to my own mac.com email address from my main email account (this is with Joyent/TextDrive) to see if it arrives in my inbox… it might take a moment to come in. Unfortunately the IMAP session becomes unresponsive - commands I am typing are not being processed, and I’m not getting any response or errors..

I’m trying again… after trying several times I can authenticate and get in again. However, even after 10 minutes I can’t see the email in my inbox. It has already arrived in my main email account I CCd it to. So, this is a bit worrying - mail that is being sent to my @mac.com/@me.com email account does not appear to be getting through. What is even more worrying is that there was no error or failure notice posted to my main account, so if it was someone else, they wouldn’t know that I didn’t receive the mail.

What this indicates to me is that the login process has got issues. If I had to take a stab in the dark, I’d say that they are using LDAP for the backend. LDAP can be distributed, which means that there can be more than one server. This may explain why sometimes I can log in, but mostly I can’t.. I wonder if they some how migrated the LDAP directory from .Mac to MobileMe and it got corrupt somehow? Or, maybe they are having issues distributing the information via Akamai?

It does appear that in this case, my email is infact still available at some level, and has not been lost, which may be reassuring to some. Quite often, email is queued for delivery. If it is having issues getting through, it may take time to bounce or be redelivered (mail might stay in a queue for up to 48 hours). Therefore, sent mail may still come through when they bring the service back online. It may also be queued up in one of there servers, waiting to be distributed out to the relevant accounts (if authentication isn’t working, it might not be able to figure out where the mail is supposed to go, LDAP stores things like home directory information, which is where mail typically ends up in many common setups). I guess we’ll find out once they bring everything back up.

Secondly, I’ll investigate the SMTP side of things. This part is used for sending mail. I’m sending the mail using “smtp.me.com” from Mail.app. I sent two emails, and both were delivered to my other account after about 5 minutes. While this is a bit longer than I’d expect, it was pretty good, and indicates that their SMTP services are still up and running.

I did some testing with my bros account, and I couldn’t get any error message after the “. login” - it just remained in zen-like peace indefinitely. So, there are obviously more issues going on than meets the eye, because while I had authentication error messages, his account appears to be experiencing something possibly different.

Please remember, that you should back up all your email. Please refer to the following. If you don’t back up your email, you run the risk of loosing it when Apple brings their services back online. This is because if when MobileMe comes back online and your mail-box is empty, Mail.app will happily erase any email stored on your computer, potentially destroying any offline Mail.app archives you have. Apple has no backup policy for your data.

MobileMe, Mail: Copying MobileMe or IMAP email messages to your hard disk http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1063

Mail 3.0 Help: Archiving mailboxes: http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?path=Mail/3.0/en/15171.html

Mac OS X: How to Back Up and Restore Your Files: http://www.info.apple.com/kbnum/n106941

Mac OS X 10.5: When to use Time Machine or MobileMe Backup to back up data http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1284