I'll try and explain briefly
Forwarding all your other accounts to @me.com is a horrible way to do things - it means all your email is going to end up in one account..or even if you set up your other accounts to forward and leave a copy in your inbox, your going to have a whole load of email you have already dealt with thats still marked as unread. Its fine - almost perfect even, if you have just one email account and can effectivly transfer over to @me, but for anyone else, its a horrible hack.
Ah OK I get you. The thing is that I definitely want all my email in one place! About a year ago I followed one of the many guides on the web about setting up Gmail to manage mail from many separate accounts and because Gmail is IMAP, it worked fine: mail read on the Gmail webmail interface or on any of my macs was marked as read in the other places too. The big selling point for me was the ability to avoid having to go to several different webmails if I was out and about and had to use an internet cafe or similar. On my mac, I could simulate having separate mailboxes by using smart mailboxes to filter incoming mail by the address it was sent to (even though obviously all of it was forwarded to Gmail; I mean the original address:
myname@myuniversity.ac,
myname@yahoo.com,
myname@mydomain.com etc etc)
The second big selling point of using Gmail in this way was that I could send from any of those addresses once I had verified them through Gmail. When MobileMe was launched I was one of those whining loudly about the lack of a "send from" feature. I have since changed my mind:
1) The Gmail send from would give Outlook users a "from" line of something like "Sent from MyName on behalf of MyName" which is annoying.
2) Thinking rationally about it, all of my accounts are set up like "MyName <myname@gmail.com>", "MyName <myname@yahoo.com>", "MyName <myname@myowndomain.com>" etc. Given that in most email clients it's the "MyName" which will show in the from field, I made a decision to just switch to @me.com and stop worrying about the fact I wasn't sending from my individual addresses. For me, having completely synchronised email (inbox, read messages, sent messages) available on my iPhone, any of my macs and the me.com webmail interface is a perfect solution.
I totally understand that it might not suit you, but for me, it means I don't forget to check one of my accounts (say my yahoo one, which I have certain things sent to but don't use it as my primary email account) and so don't miss potentially important email. One person's horrible solution is another person's ideal solution. Funny old world, eh?
The other point I was making is that Mail isn't particularly the main selling point of MobileMe for me (I was basically doing exactly the same with Gmail). For me it's the whole package: iPhoto webgalleries, iDisk, iWeb integration and contacts and calendars (which, incidentally are working for me: I added a couple of contacts and a calendar event in a bar the other day on my iPhone and then was pleasantly surprised when they were already on my mac by the time I got home)
