Beware the hidden spam filter at icloud
One of the amazing benefits of being part of Wealthy Affiliate is the community and the wealth of knowledge they contribute. I have come across a problem that I thought I would share with the community to help anyone who has encountered the same issue.
The problem I had was with sending email to my website subscribers who have icloud addresses. When I realised my emails were not getting through I set up my own icloud email account to investigate further.
Sure enough the email wasn't getting through to my inbox. This is a pretty common problem as if the email provider such as gmail or yahoo thinks the email might be spam, they pop it in your junk or spam folder for you to check. If the email isn't spam, you simply mark it as "not spam" and the emails will start landing in your inbox.
So it was with surprise and confusion that I found that not only were my emails no landing in my icloud inbox, they were not even landing in the Junk folder! How can this be???
As it turns out, one of the "features" of icloud is that they have a spam filter that has a set of criteria that if apple determines your email does not meet will be silently discarded without the recipient knowing. While Apple does send an error back to the sender, I have noticed that this does not always get passed back, depending on which email account is being used.
So you can be sending emails to someone and neither you, nor your recipient can have any way of knowing that they are not getting through, unless you are actually checking with each other. As I mentioned Apple does send a rejection message which contains a URL with more details about what you can do. The URL is https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204137
How did I get around it? Fortunately I had a number of different domain names I could use. I basically used a process of elimination to determine which one the icloud filter did not think was spam.
Hopefully you found this post useful. I would be interested to hear if you have had similar problems with icloud and how you managed to solve it, so please leave a comment.
Recent Comments
2
This is very good to know. Im new in WA so I will know about emailing to subscribers soon then I will know what to do when I notice icloud email users arent getting emails. I wonder how does icloud email filter emails. Maybe its in the name of the name?
You are right they use the reputation of the domain name as well as a number of other means. If you click on the link in this post it will take you to the Apple support page that provides a bit of detail on how they filter the email and what you can do to help prevent your email being blocked.
I hope you don't have the same problem as me when it comes time for you to be sending email out to your mail list, but if you do, hopefully this information will help you.
Cheers!