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June 30, 2009

MobileMe Caution for Stage Managers

I call this: mac — Posted by KP @ 11:41 pm

If you’re like me and are a member of Apple’s MobileMe (formerly .Mac) service, and use your MobileMe email address for business (or even excessive pleasure), you may need to know about certain policies they have to discourage people from using their accounts to send spam (as if a spammer is going to pay $100/year just to get an email address).

  • There is a maximum of 200 outgoing emails a day.
  • Maximum 1,000 recipients a day
  • Maximum 100 recipients per message
  • 20MB limit per message

The policies are outlined on this page.

I haven’t had a massive problem with this, although my SMTP server did stop working this morning. It being the day of the first rehearsal, you can imagine how many emails I’ve been sending to my cast of 59, plus the production team. Thankfully I was able to immediately switch to the smtp server used by my @thegobutton.net addresses, and didn’t think anything of it until I coincidentally heard of this policy a few hours later. I’m not sure if it was related or not, but given the size of the cast and the nature of my job, especially in preproduction and the early stages of the rehearsal process, it’s definitely within the realm of possibility that I will be hitting these limits at some point.

Currently the general email list (cast, plus the people in the office, director, designers, music staff and department heads) totals 75 people, so under different circumstances hitting 100 wouldn’t be that hard.

I still think the MobileMe service is a good value, especially with recent features they’ve added like Find My iPhone, but since I just learned of this potential problem, I thought I should mention it since it’s at least something to keep in mind when sending frequent group emails.


March 4, 2008

Sometimes Apple Scares Me

I call this: mac,theatre — Posted by KP @ 4:43 pm

But in that way that you can’t even worry about your privacy because it’s just so damn cool.

Hey, two posts in one day! I have to tell you what just happened to me.

I’m doing this reading next week, so I’m in preproduction. I have some contact info for the cast and creative team, so I’m starting to enter it into Apple’s Address Book app. I’m using the cool new feature that Mail has in Leopard where it detects phone numbers and e-mail addresses in your mail and offers to add them to your address book. Since the only contact info I have is in plain text in an e-mail from the director, this saves me a lot of retyping or cutting and pasting. The system is not perfect by any means, but it’s still a time saver.

So I get to this one actor, who is a Broadway actor that I’ve vaguely heard of, but one I’m sure I’ve never met. I create a contact in my address book based on his e-mail address, and when I later go back to sort my contacts, I find that the guy’s headshot has been added in the photo slot of his contact file! I then see that his e-mail is from a dot Mac account, which no doubt somehow explains this. I’m not sure if this is a feature you have to opt in for, but what I’m guessing is happening is that Address Book automatically matches @mac.com e-mail addresses to the person’s account and their own address card. It hasn’t filled in any other personal information though, as I’m still lacking his phone number (this is definitely a good thing, for privacy reasons). Maybe it just does the picture. I will post an update if I find out more about how this is done.

UPDATE: Found out how it’s done. A quick search on MacNN solves all.
If you have a .Mac account you can go to the webmail page (webmail.mac.com) and click on preferences (upper right of your mailbox area). In the “Composing” tab, there is a place where you can add your photo. Presumably from there all Mac users will see this photo when they read your e-mails in Mail or they enter your e-mail address in their Address Book. I didn’t have a photo set, but obviously I need to add one now. Will it look unprofessional if I use my default iChat icon?