Apple's mysterious David G., apparently a member of the MobileMe product team (and possibly a relative of saxophonist Kenny G), tells us in a post last week [1] that the 1 percent of MobileMe users stranded without access to archived mail since 18-Jul-08 - but with the ability to send and receive new mail since 25-Jul-08 - should all be back in action.
Mr. G. says that any remaining email problems should be unrelated to this issue. Apple established a chat line for remaining mail problems [2], but says it should only be used for these problems. Their regular chat line, which I used last week, has a 30-minute wait time.
I've critiqued Apple about the MobileMe launch fiasco a number of times in the last few weeks; how would I have handled it? I've been in situations with much smaller numbers of customers or clients where outages have occurred, and worked with firms that have gone through such outages (as a customer or client).
Essentially, Apple waited a week to provide fresh, identically named accounts for those without email, restoring email from that missing week. Over the last week, they merged archived messages into those new accounts. They could have made that decision earlier and been seen as very responsive, saving thousands of people days of frustration.
By refusing to acknowledge the problems in public for as long as they did, Apple has instead annoyed numerous customers (to put it mildly) and come off as arrogant and incompetent.
[1]: http://www.apple.com/mobileme/status/
[2]: http://www.apple.com/support/mobileme/mailchat