Soft bounce back from iCloud mail

By Bingo Little, 27 January, 2023

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Hello all,

I'm a season ticket holder at Saracens Rugby Club here in england and I use my iCloud email address with my Saracens account. Each week, the club will email out team news, offers for seasonal members to ballot for international tickets, that sort of thing. In September I stopped receiving these emails for no apparent reason. Having enquired, I'm told by Saracens that since September their emails sent to my iCloud account have been marked as 'sot bounce-back' which, according to Saracens, means there's a change in my iCloud email settings or alternatively their emails are too big for my email account. Well, it can't be the last of those - Sarecens emails are very small - and I have not chaned any iCloud email setting. I could of course give Saracens another email account to use and I might just do that, but perhaps I'm missing out on other emails too. so does anyone know what might be going on here and how I can put it right? I've checked every conceiveable folder - junk, archive, trash - I've even gone to the last circular I received from saracens and marked the sender as a VIP. The other weird thing is it only seems to happen with sarecens circulars - if they email me individually about anything, the emails get through fine. Any thoughts would really be appreciated. I did'nt even know there was a way of changing iCloud email settings and I've seen nowhere to create a whitelist, for instance.

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Comments

By Mlth on Tuesday, February 21, 2023 - 16:55

The problem might be on their end, if they misconfigured their SPF, DKIM or DMARC. What message do they get back from your provider?

By Sebby on Tuesday, February 21, 2023 - 16:55

In order to know what the exact problem is, we'd need to have the bounce they received.

But, having said that, to be honest, it's probably iCloud. Their filtering is notoriously aggressive, often just losing mail rather than bouncing it at all. If you can, set up an alternative account, preferably at a domain name that you own and control so you can forward or receive it anywhere, then you can control the spam filtering and as a happy by-product you can tell who leaks your email if that happens because the address will disclose who it was from.

By Bingo Little on Tuesday, February 21, 2023 - 16:55

thanks both. They're restricted as to what they can share with me - or, which amounts to the same thing, what they will share with me. Apparently the emails get marked as deferred. In any event, they're not going to change their email settings just for me.

I spent an hour and a half on the phone to Apple on Friday afternoon. Straight out of the Apple playbook, the tech guys did their level best to blame my hardware. We even had the absurdity of the support chap asking me to try and add my iCloud account to my phone - the iCloud account which was already there and receiving most messages except these ones! Eventually, they had to concede it was an iCloud issue and apparently the engineers are working on it. On this journey, incidentally, I did encounter two more Apple technicians who didn't know what Voiceover was and one who didn't appear to grasp the difference between an Apple ID and an iCloud email address. Very frustrating.

Sebbie, I think you're right: I won't live forever so I will need to change my email address for sarries. Unfortunately the way their systems are set up that means messing about with the season ticket as well so its more complicated than simply updating your contact details, but there we are. Thanks Apple - three months' worth of member benefits missed and a few hours of my life I'll never have again.