For a very long time I've felt that iCloud Mail simply silences legitimate messages that it considers spam, and by silencing I mean that they are dropped into the void with no warning to either the sender or the recipient, since those messages never appear in the recipient's junk folder and the senders never receive bounce mail.
A couple of years ago, Google announced the end of their grandfathered free G-Suite accounts, which I owned myself, so I decided to delete mine and switch my personal domain to Apple for use with iCloud Mail, as I assumed that the silent E-mail drops were a thing of the past. Eventually Google made a U-turn and announced that the free grandfathered G-Suite accounts weren't going anywhere after all, but that announcement came way too late for me, so I've been on iCloud Mail ever since.
Fast forward to a couple of weeks ago and I decided to register a new domain for myself and move all my E-mail communications to addresses under that domain, once again taking advantage of Apple's custom E-mail domain on iCloud for that. However, and contrary to my expectations, I noticed that the silent dropping of certain E-mails remained, as I wasn't getting any confirmation E-mails from audiogames.net, and now even E-mails that I BCC to myself aren't arriving, but at least I get bounce from Apple, in the junk folder, meaning Apple is marking their own E-mails as junk.
Unfortunately E-mail is rather complex to host these days, as due to spam and for security reasons, a number of extra protocols like TLS, SPF, DKIM, and DMARC must be properly followed, the machine hosting the SMTP server must have a reverse-DNS entry matching its announced name, and setting up an E-mail server to match all the requirements means running a bunch of services thus increasing the attack surface, and since I'm far from being a decent systems administrator, instead of self-hosting my E-mail I am paying third-party services to host E-mails sent to my old domain name and will do the same for the new as well, and will drop from an Apple One subscription to just an Apple Music subscription, because I simply cannot tolerate this level of incompetence from a company the size of Apple.
Comments
Yes, yes and yes
But I am too lazy to change provider and don't necessarily want to pay the new price of workspace starter. Gmail web is underrated. I had the exact same discussion with somebody else here by pm. Fun.
But yeah, apple mail is beyond bad and you've described it pretty well. Even apple support people have some weird trick over official support call to fix things without recoding the damn thing, like when I had an issue with my apple account primary email changed from icloud to my domain but then wanted to get back the @icloud mail which was not available for this specific purpose and they made me log out and sign in or something very weird and said basically without saying yeah, we're aware we suck. I don't even remember the actual issue, probably have some email log of it. But it was horrible. I missed some government stuff too! But I just feel too lazy to change it now and for me it has not happened much often lately, and as we say I can't be aware of what I've missed because, well, I've missed it.
This is somewhat distressing news
I had a primary email address through my ISP for over 25 years; there have been issues lately that make me think that perhaps the domain is gradually being phaised out by my ISP. I have a GMail account, but it's mostly for games and other less important things. I decided to make the icloud email address Apple gave me years ago my new primary email for stuff that actually matters. So far as I know, it's been working perfectly, but I guess that if emails were disappearing, I'd never know about it. I know that I haven't had any issues where I was expecting a message that never arrived, so I guess I'll call that a win. At this point, I more or less exclusively use email on my phone.
My experience
While I cannot comment on whether or not I have had emails disappear into the ether, I can say that I have had quite a few emails over the years that immediately go into the archive folder upon a receipt. That is to say, when I get a new email, it's not in my inbox, it is in my archive folder as a new/unread message. I can also attest to @Choom's comment that Apple emails love to visit the Junk folder. 🙄
Question for clarification
We are just talking about using iCloud as an email address correct? Because I use the native Apple Mail app all the time for my Gmail and I haven’t had issues with that. It seems like what you guys may be saying I’m here though is that it’s an email issue. I don’t even use that so I hope you guys issues get resolved though that’s crazy. Freshly if it was any email that was in any importance and you need it.
Singer Girl
Yes. We are referring to using iCloud as an email domain. Example:
User@ iCloud.com.
As opposed to...
User@gmail.com.
hth. 😆
My experience
This story is a couple of years old. I didn't share as, until I saw this topic, I thought it was just me: I am a season ticketholder at Saracens RFC. You know the one - Saracens, multiple winners of england's rugby Premiership and champions of Europe I think three times since 2016! The Saracens of Billy Vunipola, Mako Vunipola, Maro Itoje, Jamie George, Elliot Daly and the great Owen Farrell..oh of course, and Alex Goode who should have played far more for england. anyway, my Saracens emails all come to my iCloud email address. Suddenly, in July 2024, everything stopped. I thought to myself: hey ho, the season's over so of course they won't be writing to me; but then they didn't resume in september. Turned out that all my Saracens emails were disappearing into the void. No junkmail, no spam, no bounce-back to Saracens...nothing. Saracens couldn't work out why. When I reported it to apple, they couldn't work out why either. All sorted itself by magic a few months later but by then I'd missed a large number of important ones. For example, I missed my opportunity to enter the seasonal members' ballot for England v France, england v Ireland and england v Italy at Twickenham Stadium in February/March 2025! I was hoping to get to one of those games. The thing is, I'd have understood a little more if they'd gone into the junk folder. That would have been easy to sort out - I could have simply whitelisted the email address. as it is, I wouldn't use iCloud for anything of importance...not like I have just done, contrary to my own advice, for the Wimbledon public ballot 2027. I'll let applevisers know if I am successful therein.
Updating email accounts can be so frustrating
Bingo Little said:
Who⁉️
I have so many professional entities tied into my iCloud email. It's gonna be a barrel of laughs updating them with a new email address, once I finally figure out which email provider I wish to go with. 😣
I personally use iCloud, and Google
I personally use iCloud and Google. However, for my music, my website, my social media and my discord related stuff. I get people to send me an email through my proton.ME address because my Google is just so stacked with random emails. It's hard to go through them all. I think I have about 9700 in read Google emails? My Microsoft 365 email has like 300 in red and my iCloud has like 11 and red.
TLDR. I'm not good at reading or responding to emails. But I really should clean out my Google inbox eventually or organizing it at least
This helps.
Yes, this helps. :-) Well I don’t use iCloud email at all so thankfully I haven’t experienced this. I’m sorry for everybody. Who has that’s crazy. Emotion shouldn’t just be disappearing into the cyber space somewhere. Nobody’s emails just be randomly disappearing. Especially if you’ve had really important ones that you’ve missed.
For Brian
Become a Saracens supporter, Brian. cheer on the best. Come on, Sarries!
Re: Updating email accounts can be so frustrating
In my case I use my own domains for mail, so the addresses stay the same regardless of where my mail is hosted. Moving over is just a matter of ensuring that nothing important is missed because deleting a custom domain from iCloud removes all the messages previously sent to that domain as well. I currently have my old domain hosted at Proton Mail, but don't like the fact that standard services such as SMTP for Mail User Agents and IMAP are only available by installing Proton Mail Bridge, so I'll probably move my new domain elsewhere, most likely to Gandi, which is also my current DNS registrar.
@Choom
Eh, fair enough. I mean, I do have options. Including, but not limited to, using the email service provided by my ISP. My main concern is collecting all of the, "important emails", so that I don't lose them, should I ever get rid of my iCloud email completely. More than likely, and quite possibly due to sheer laziness, I will just keep my iCloud email around so I've got those emails in a relatively safe and secure location.
I imagine at some point I will likely just go back to Gmail. I actually do have an old Gmail account, but I do not actively use it for email Services, as it is an old, old account. We're talking Gmail open beta here.
It too has important emails that I really should sort out and delete that old account.
Maybe one day... 🤷