I can confirm too. Nice find. There have been reports about silent filtering before, but now we have concrete proof. Hopefully they'll do something about it. Given the high rate of false positives that many spam filters have, the risk of losing important mail is just too high.
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iCloud mail, silent spam filtering, and reliability
- Thread starter exi
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I had already begun the process of transitioning back to Gmail again! These are perfect examples of why I just can't truly rely on Apples mail... As much as I want to. Major bummer!
Level 3 tech support's response (communicated via Level 2 support) was to
1) remove abcwidgets.com from the list of blacklisted words
2) deny that any such list exists
3) completely ignore the real issue of how they are selectively silently deleting emails without informing either the sender or recipient.
Level 2 support agreed that this all sounded fishy but said there was nothing else they could do.
iCloud account has been put into "troubleshooting Mode" by Apple
I have just searched and registered with this forum....
My wife's email account has been completely unreliable for the last couple of months now and apple cannot solve the problem.
The account was an original .mac therefore is now a .me and a .cloud too. She has been losing email from all sorts of sources which in the past there were no problems receiving from, now we are discovering that there are sporadic problems with sending emails too. We have collected loads of evidence of these missing emails, its not device specific as the same happens if logged on to iCloud from the web.
Apple do not seem to know whats going on they have rebuilt, reset the account many times and now moved into a state of "troubleshooting" mode so they have full access to it!
They kind of admit that its the spam filters but their fall back position is that its other people's servers not theirs.
The only thing that makes any sense is that their silent filtering has gone nuts rendering the whole service to us useless....... she now has a G mail account set up.
Email has to be reliable! iCloud is not.
I have just searched and registered with this forum....
My wife's email account has been completely unreliable for the last couple of months now and apple cannot solve the problem.
The account was an original .mac therefore is now a .me and a .cloud too. She has been losing email from all sorts of sources which in the past there were no problems receiving from, now we are discovering that there are sporadic problems with sending emails too. We have collected loads of evidence of these missing emails, its not device specific as the same happens if logged on to iCloud from the web.
Apple do not seem to know whats going on they have rebuilt, reset the account many times and now moved into a state of "troubleshooting" mode so they have full access to it!
They kind of admit that its the spam filters but their fall back position is that its other people's servers not theirs.
The only thing that makes any sense is that their silent filtering has gone nuts rendering the whole service to us useless....... she now has a G mail account set up.
Email has to be reliable! iCloud is not.
Abcwidgets.com is stealth registered. Interesting... Wonder who owns it.
If you go to it, it shows 'unregistered', but the page source has references to areasnap.com which is also stealth registered and apparently was used for browser hijacks and spam at one time. Areasnap.com has references to firstlook.com, and then the trail runs cold.
One thought on the handling of the disappeared messages is that the 'bounce' messages are server dependent. Some servers don't generate them, and many servers don't process them as they are a form of an attack on the users of that server. My business email server does not generate them, and it doesn't process the majority of them either. It can be a PITA troubleshooting missing messages, but it's safer to ignore them.
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I know that emails from at least two sources never arrive at my .mac address, and they arrive just fine to two other email addresses from other providers. I know these were sent - they were password reset requests and email subscription verification emails that I requested - repeatedly. The content on one was not the reason they were deleted by Apple, because when the subscription verification email did arrive to a different email address, I forwarded it to my .mac address and it arrived then - so at least in this case, it appears to be blacklisted based on the sender's server or IP address or domain name rather than email content. Again, these don't go to the junk folder, they just never arrive.
Really makes me wonder how many important emails sent to me via .mac / MobileMe / iCloud over the years never got to me. There is no way to tell if an email gets rejected unless you are expecting it and know that it should have arrived, or the sender contacts you in another way. No telling how many other users have been negatively impacted either. Simply unacceptable on Apple's part that these settings can't be altered, and it seems the only real solution is to never use Apple's email service again.
Really makes me wonder how many important emails sent to me via .mac / MobileMe / iCloud over the years never got to me. There is no way to tell if an email gets rejected unless you are expecting it and know that it should have arrived, or the sender contacts you in another way. No telling how many other users have been negatively impacted either. Simply unacceptable on Apple's part that these settings can't be altered, and it seems the only real solution is to never use Apple's email service again.
Thanks for posting. Unsure what your other email services are, but if one of them is Outlook.com, do you have the same issue there?
Have been irritated by this whole thing on and off for a long time but, because I've yet to have any big issues with missing something important, I'm still on iCloud.
Our ski club mailing list has been caught by this problem. Members with me.com and iCloud.com accounts don't receive any posts because the footers contain the web site URL: www.scom.org.uk.
I found all mail containing scom.org in the body or subject was discarded, whether from or to apple addresses.
It took 2 hours on the phone to support to prove there was a problem and three weeks later it's still not been rectified. There should be a simple system for reporting false positives.
iCloud email is not fit for purpose.
I found all mail containing scom.org in the body or subject was discarded, whether from or to apple addresses.
It took 2 hours on the phone to support to prove there was a problem and three weeks later it's still not been rectified. There should be a simple system for reporting false positives.
iCloud email is not fit for purpose.
Just tried this myself.
Sure enough, "scom.org" and "scom.org.uk" in the body led to the emails being lost to the ether. Not in the inbox, not in junk mail.
"scom" in the body was received without incident.
Unacceptable. Might just finally take mail to Outlook.com (not in the petty "waaahh, I'm leaving" way -- just in the "too unreliable for my taste" way). At least the rest of iCloud's services seem to be okay.
One thing that gets me is that rules are not communicated between the various systems that my account is on.
But whatever...
But whatever...
This issue appears to be fixed. I successfully received an email containing "scom.org" in the body on an iCloud account sent from an external account.
No, not working. Tried from 2 non-apple accounts to iCloud and vice-versa.
The test message was:
The URI www.scom.org.uk should not be blocked.
Steve
The test message was:
The URI www.scom.org.uk should not be blocked.
Steve
Yes, mailing list details added at the end of the original message but still part of the message body:
_______________________________________________
Newsflash mailing list
http://mail.scom.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/newsflash_scom.org.uk
In fact someone has just posted to the list and I didn't get the message at my iCloud address.
exi: What region are you in? Maybe some servers have had their filter rules updated.
_______________________________________________
Newsflash mailing list
http://mail.scom.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/newsflash_scom.org.uk
In fact someone has just posted to the list and I didn't get the message at my iCloud address.
exi: What region are you in? Maybe some servers have had their filter rules updated.
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Northern United States. It really does work for me. I just tried it again. Messages sent from an external-to-iCloud to an iCloud address containing the strings scom.org.uk as well as scom.org are received without issue.