POP Doesn't Go Mac.com E-Mail

For the past two days, my mac.com / me.com POP email account has failed to work. I can't connect to check mail. I know that mail is coming in, because I can log in via iCloud or IMAP service and read the mail. I could forward the e-mail to my Gmail account, but Apple still has an archaic 200-emails-per-day limit, at which point they cut off your account, so I'm just having to let emails pile up in the box, respond to the most urgent via IMAP, and hope that Apple gets this fixed sometime soon.

The first experience was not very encouraging, however. Spend 45 minutes on the phone with 2 reps, and both of them basically said, "Hmmm..." followed by "Oh, well..." I was promised that someone at higher level tech support would investigate and find a solution right away, but that hasn't happened. He also said he was sending me a text transcript of our chat, but he didn't--and for some reason, the "email" button that appeared at the end of our chat was grayed out, so I coudn't select it.

Why is this inconvenient? Because, while I use my mac.com address as my primary public email address, I actually have a Gmail account set up to check my POP accounts and aggregate the email at one central address. I can respond to each email from the address to which the original mail was sent. I can even SEND email from my POP account, I just can't receive email.

At first the tech rep thought it was a computer problem, but I told him that it simultaneously failed to work on a total of 16 different computers using four different ISPs; it also quit working on my various IOS 5 devices and through Gmail. The rep finally checked and verified that it was NOT working to receive mail, although he had no idea why.

I know that things can go wrong--it's how a company addresses the issue that's a real measure of success. I've never known Apple to leave me hanging for days with a problem like this. I've also never known them to fail to contact me right away when they said they were going to.

Hope I can get this working sometime in the near future. I am currently anticipating a Sisyphusian ordeal whereby I have to call Apple again, wait for a while, explain the problem once again, prove that it's not a local computer issue, then listen to another rep go "Hmmm..."

Come on, Apple--prove me wrong and get this resolved!