Apple recently announced the beta of an update to its Web-based mail service, MobileMe Mail. The beta offers widescreen and compact views, single-click archiving, a message-formatting toolbar, increased security via SSL, server-based rules, and overall enhanced performance. The beta is open to all MobileMe users, and you can switch back to the previous version at any time. To sign up, log in to MobileMe Mail and click the link to request an invitation in the lower left of the page.

Apple has posted a MobileMe Mail Beta FAQ. A point in the FAQ that caught my eye is that rules you set up on the MobileMe site will apply to any incoming MobileMe-based email first. If you read your MobileMe-based email only through a Web browser on the me.com Web site, that makes sense and should work out nicely for you, without any special effort beyond setting up rules, if you so wish. However, if you also read your email in some other context, you should be aware that the email will arrive pre-filtered, so any local rules on your computer may not work as they did in the past.

A great thing about cloud-based rules is that if you read your email on more than one device—perhaps an iPad and a Macintosh, or maybe an iPhone and a Windows PC—you can apply the rules once to email as it arrives on the MobileMe site, and then the rules will have sorted your email already before you read it on your various devices. However, if you've already set up local rules on one or more devices, before you set up new rules on the MobileMe site, you should first consider your overall rules configuration, disable any local rules that would conflict with your new cloud-based rules, and once your new rules are working properly, you can further modify or delete your local rules.

Another interesting item posted by Apple is MobileMe Mail: Beta known issues. It appears that Apple is periodically updating this article to describe fixed and still-to-be-fixed problem. I noticed, for instance, that, as of June 2nd, Apple is working on a problem wherein rules set up on the MobileMe site may take up to 15 minutes to begin applying to new messages.

If you sign up for the beta, notice the Help, FAQ, and Feedback links at the lower left of the Mail interface.

—Posted by Tonya Engst on June 11, 2010