Well, I concluded with .Mac was not worth a 100 dollars a year, two years ago. And some of my friends have over time asked me about alternatives, so I guess they are basically thinking the same. .Mac is a set of services, e-mail, web pages, online hosting of pictures, backup services, syncing of bookmarks and calendars. And one thing should be said already now, the two years I used .Mac I paid less then a 100 dollars a year, and .Mac users get special offers on software and more from Apple, so if you make use of most of the offers, you can “get” the .Mac account quite cheap in the end. Another big pro with .Mac, is that you get all the services in one place and that is also worth something!

Let us start with e-mail. Apple’s e-mail service is brilliant, with a beautiful AJAX based web client and the service also supports POP and IMAP so that you can use your favourite e-mail client. If you use IMAP, all your e-mails will be stored on the e-mail server and you can access them from where ever you are in the world. Gmail doesn’t live up to this, as Google has only implemented the POP protocol, but you can almost store unlimited with e-mails on your account. If you are one of the few that have your own server space with a domain name, you could consider Squirrel Mail. This is an excellent, free webmail client. If it’s all about beauty, then why not try the RoundCube Webmail Project? It is perhaps the most beautiful webmail client I have seen so far. All three alternatives to Apple’s webmail has addressbooks included, but you are only capable of syncing Gmail with the AddressBook (ABGmerge) on your machine.

With iWeb you can upload web pages to your .Mac account (and also other webDAV servers). There are many free alternatives. If you again go to Google, you can get an account for creating static web pages or use their Blogger services to create a blog. An alternative for blogging is the free WordPress, that lets you have a blog on their or your own server. My blog is running WordPress, and there is no way that I would be using iWeb for this!

I guess you as me would like to share the pictures you have been taking. They are not only for your memory after all. Apple’s service lets you do so. Sadly I don’t know of any free unlimited service for this. I am a great fan of Flickr, a service that costs 25 dollars a year and lets you upload far more pictures then on .Mac. An alternative is again Google with their Picasaweb. Sadly Picasa is only for Windows, but Google has made a free Picasa plugin for iPhoto, so this time you end up getting the best of both worlds.

Syncing of bookmarks. I am not a great fan of sharing all my bookmarks with the rest of the world, so no del.icio.us recommendations from me! But I would like to have the same bookmarks available on my work machine and the machine at home. Let me limit myself to the Safari browser on this, for the Firefox browser there are several alternatives available. SafariDepot allows bookmark synchronization over FTP and FTPS (secure FTP), so if you like me has your homearea on a server that allows SFTP connections you can use this service. The magic word is again, that it is free.

Oh yes, also iCal can be synced against Google’s Calendar. At least soon. The application is still in a closed beta and you can follow the developers progress from a blog. Spanning Sync seems to become a beautiful Mac application and is definatly something to look out for.

It all boils down to trust. Who do you trust your private data to? And the question is also if you trust Apple all your private data, why shouldn’t you trust Google? And another thing that needs to be said, setting up services on your own server is a security risk! You must be able to configure things correctly when setting them up, and be able to patch the systems when security patches are made available. Having said that, this of course have a cost! The time spent looking for updates, making backups and setting the new versions up.