PSA: Your @Mac.com, @Me.com, or @iCloud.com Emails Sent via Gmail Might Be Marked as Spam Now

[ignatius345]

You would have had to have MobileMe when it was a service. It was prior to iCloud. And before MobileMe, it was .Mac.

So - iTools -> .Mac -> MobileMe -> iCloud

Weird. I just realized I have a me.com alias on iCloud and I don't remember signing up for MobileMe at all ever. I think I set these aliases up a couple years ago when I started using iCloud Mail more and I seem to remember @me.com being an option then. I guess I could be wrong.

edit: I just did some research and I am wrong. I guess I have a "limited edition" email address? If they ever beef up iCloud Mail a bit, I might be tempted to finally switch over from Gmail for my main personal account.

 

[cwanja]

Weird. I just realized I have a me.com alias on iCloud and I don't remember signing up for MobileMe at all ever. I think I set these aliases up a couple years ago when I started using iCloud Mail more and I seem to remember @me.com being an option then. I guess I could be wrong.

edit: I just did some research and I am wrong. I guess I have a "limited edition" email address? If they ever beef up iCloud Mail a bit, I might be tempted to finally switch over from Gmail for my main personal account.

It is possible, based on some replies prior to yours in this thread, that Apple gave you an @me email address with iCloud. See here:

Not that it matters, but technically @me.com addresses were available with iCloud accounts prior to around the release of iOS 6. That's how I got mine.

 

[rodpascoe]

At this point, I'm not entirely sure what has fixed the issue for me, but hopefully tinkering with the SMTP server settings works for others. If not, and you have an important email to send via your @mac.com, @me.com, or @icloud.com address, make sure to send it from Apple's own Mail app or iCloud.com.

You DO NOT have to send it via Apple Mail or icloud.com, that's simply not true. Stop spreading FUD.

If you properly configure any mail client using Apple's guidelines then it will work. Apple Mail is not 'special', it's just an IMAP mail client.

I use Spark and nd it's working 100% perfectly with the app specific password I've setup with Apple (as per their guidelines for sending via 3rd party apps)

 

[SDub90]

You DO NOT have to send it via Apple Mail or icloud.com, that's simply not true. Stop spreading FUD.

If you properly configure any mail client using Apple's guidelines then it will work. Apple Mail is not 'special', it's just an IMAP mail client.

I use Spark and nd it's working 100% perfectly with the app specific password I've setup with Apple (as per their guidelines for sending via 3rd party apps)

Just to add onto this (since I use gmail to manage 50+ e-mail addresses across gmail, icloud, exchange, and others) - you should still set it up to send through SMTP. You will have the e-mail in your 'sent' folder in the original account and you will avoid having it appear as EmailYoureSendingFrom@gmail.com (On behalf of AddressYoureSendingAs@me.com) and it will keep the originating address hidden (headers will show your gmail account). The gmail account I use doesn't include my name or anything (might as well be randomly generated), so having it appear would be confusing or alarming for the recipient -- and I just don't want them to reply to it as it will screw up having e-mails go where they should be.

 

[posguy99]

Cool. Now get labels to work in the Apple Mail app on Mac and I’m set.

Gods, we can only hope that Google's non-standard IMAP bizzare-ness never infects anything other than Google themselves. People who think that the broken behavior is a good idea deserve to be forced into using the GMail web app.

 

[supercoolmanchu]

Gods, we can only hope that Google's non-standard IMAP bizzare-ness never infects anything other than Google themselves. People who think that the broken behavior is a good idea deserve to be forced into using the GMail web app.

Yep, Google’s standard operating proceedure is to Microsoft any widely used file format or protocol.

Gmail has always ‘mark of shameware’, just a goofball el cheapo email service for Hotmail & Hotmail ‘Pro’ (Outlook) refugees.

 

[pdxrevolution]

This has nothing to do with the fact it's Gmail. DMARC validation fails whenever the email is sent through an email server other than the one(s) specified in the domain's DMARC DNS configuration. So, if Apple specifies that iCloud email gets sent through *.me.com servers, then DMARC validation fails any time iCloud emails are sent through servers other than Apple's. When you send email through Gmail, or Newton, or Sanebox, or any of these services that actually send the mail on your behalf, DMARC validation is going to fail. This may not be readily apparent to users, who just think they have a convenient way to have multiple inboxes.

This is not an Apple issue or a Google issue. This would happen if any email is sent through a server other than the one the email domain privileges.

 

[hagar]

I love my @mac.com address. Feels special now that you can’t register them anymore

 

[sunapple]

What I don't get about AppleIDs is why you have to register using an existing email address. Say you have no email address and you're looking for an @icloud.com, you'd have to also register a Gmail account for example.

This is how I setup my account years ago, recently I found out it's possible to remove that Gmail account and only use @icloud.com for an AppleID.

I've always used my @me.com address for email, so it was great being able to remove other addresses.

 

[Solomani]

I forward all of my iCloud alias emails to Gmail, but no longer use the @Mac or @icloud alias for sending. I definitely do not use the @me

Interesting change. Wonder why Apple made it.

Why did Apple make the changes? Well…. Apple has been the largest company in the known world (in market value), and hence has (in recent years) been the prime target of spammers, telemarketers, advertisers, junk mailers, etc. There are literally hundreds of scams which involve scammers pretending to be the iCloud or App Store Customer Service, and these scammers are trying to phish for customer passwords/accounts, etc.

Apple's App Store, iTunes Store, and even ApplePay dominate….. in fact, they make more revenue than most of their direct competitors (e.g. GooglePlay). That's why Apple's customer-base is such a lucrative target for scammers, spammers and fraud.

So yeah, I'm not surprised Apple had to step up their anti-spam, anti-fraud measures quite a bit. And in the end…. customers have to ask themselves, are the inconveniences worth it?

 

[mbradley]

To be precise, this is not about using a third party email “client” but a third party smtp server - another isp’s mail server.

Gmail (as does all web mail) conflates for the user all the distinct moving parts of sending, receiving, reading and composing email — but this article is all about how Apple, as many ISPs do, tells the world to favor mail sent from its domains through its actual servers vs other ones and how to deal with that.

In the old fashioned world of using a separate mail client (like mail.app on your phone or Mac) this is something most people do by default anyway - and switching to another mail client (like Thunderbird or whatever) doesn’t change that.

 

[MrUNIMOG]

Same here, and I converted it to an @icloud account a few years back without thinking, and now I regret it. I wish I still had the @me email account.

How did you do that? Just so I can make sure to avoid it.

My Apple ID actually has both, @me.com and @icloud.com aliases. Didn't know there was a way of losing one of them!

 

[gnasher729]

It could be the same problem that the NHS (National Health Service) in the UK had. They have about 500,000 email addresses and use them. Millions and millions of emails sent every day. So some computer decided that millions and millions of emails from NHS.com mean it must be spam.

Could be that some computer thought millions of emails every day from me.com must be spam as well. Then people complained, and the spam filter was unlocked. And all the things you did in between had nothing to do with the solution to the problem.

 

[Vorkeyjones]

I'm so glad I got an @me address before they were discontinued. @icloud sounds too generic.

 

[B60boy]

If what you're saying is you're johnsmith@gmail.com and he's john.smith@gmail.com then this isn't correct since GMail doesn't care about the dots - https://support.google.com/mail/answer/7436150?hl=en

I read the same thing but trust me, I get this fairly frequently. I even called the auto repair place that I received and email from for my oil change (wasn't for me) and the guy confirmed that his customer has a dot between the first and last name. Definitely a quality control issue for gmail. So much for AI huh?

 

[Primus84]

I read the same thing but trust me, I get this fairly frequently. I even called the auto repair place that I received and email from for my oil change (wasn't for me) and the guy confirmed that his customer has a dot between the first and last name. Definitely a quality control issue for gmail. So much for AI huh?

Nope not at all - Gmail does not care about dots at all it simply doesn't work the way you are describing. I've tested this myself by placing dots all over the place, no dots, dots half way through etc.

 

[B60boy]

Nope not at all - Gmail does not care about dots at all it simply doesn't work the way you are describing. I've tested this myself by placing dots all over the place, no dots, dots half way through etc.

Maybe it worked for you. I have shared screen shots of this to prove it. Doesn't happen all the time but enough to make me go umm....

Plus, I had my gmail account under the beta program back in 2005.

 

[Primus84]

If Gmail ignores full stops/dots/periods then it ignores them across all addresses otherwise it wouldn't work at all!

 

[bstpierre]

This may be new because my wife has a dot version of another person (FirstnameLastname@gmail) and has received some emails from the other person in the past.

It is not new. I have a gmail account that I sometimes get email meant for a guy in Toronto with the same name. The issue isn't the dots but the sender not using the other guy's middle initial (which is the difference in our addresses). I feel the error is sometimes on his part when he subscribes to email lists.

 

[sunshifter]

To be precise, this is not about using a third party email “client” but a third party smtp server - another isp’s mail server.

Gmail (as does all web mail) conflates for the user all the distinct moving parts of sending, receiving, reading and composing email — but this article is all about how Apple, as many ISPs do, tells the world to favor mail sent from its domains through its actual servers vs other ones and how to deal with that.

In the old fashioned world of using a separate mail client (like mail.app on your phone or Mac) this is something most people do by default anyway - and switching to another mail client (like Thunderbird or whatever) doesn’t change that.

Thanks, mbradley you are the only person here who I think has got this right. This has nothing to do with third party clients.... but may I also add that as a user of @Mac since it’s inception, this is indeed also a new problem. I only use Mail, not a third party client, when sending email from my @Mac account... and sure enough, only in the last week have I been hearing from friends about hitting their spam email boxes. What do these friends have in common? They only have gmail and they had no problem when I sent from my gmail address or my own domain. Sure enough, the problem occurs when I send from my laptop which was configured to go through my cable ISP’s server and not Apple’s. Problem does not occur when sending @Mac from Mail in iOS where I was sending through Apple’s server. Bottom line, I will reconfigure my laptop to see if the problem goes away and let everyone know.

 

[Southern Dad]

This is the primary reason I don't promote @gmail.com @me.com or any public free email domain that I don't have any control and use my own domain name email address for decades. And on top of that I have been using ProtonMail Plus (with my own domain) for more than a year for encrypted storage and communications even using the Mail.app on MacOS, great service.

Like you, I use my own domain for emails. Do you host your own domain or are you hosting it on a hosting service?

 

[sunshifter]

Deleted. Coffee before posting next time.