iCloud filtering out email?

[eastender]

I've just had an irate tradesman on the phone wondering why I haven't
paid his bill he's emailed twice to my iCloud account. Except I didn't
get them, and they are not in the junk folder.

I then found this:

http://www.macworld.com/article/2029570/silent-email-filtering-makes-icloud-an-unreliable-option.html


'Last November, our friends at Infoworld reported that Apple’s iCloud
email system silently blocks emails containing certain phrases. And
that hasn’t changed in the intervening months, as Macworld UK reports.'

I hasten to add that 'barely legal teen' is not the phrase I'm wanting
but I do work in the health sector so certain frank language is an
issue.

This is three years ago though, but is raising alarm bells as I use
iCloud a lot now.

Anyone else had issues like this - I cannot afford to not know about
emails that get turned away by Apple.

E. (marc)

[Steve W]

Our ski club mailing list was recently affecred by Apples's filtering policy.

Anything containing scom.org (including our club's URL, scom.org.uk) to or from icloud.com or me.com addresses was
silently discarded.

It's mentioned at the end of this thread:
http://forums.macrumors.com/threads/icloud-mail-silent-spam-filtering-an
d-reliability.1690763

The engineer who called me to say they'd removed the filter didn't see their policy as a problem.

If you want to send and receive email reliably don't use an Apple account.

--
Steve W

[Jon B]

God it sounds like 2001 again when you couldn't email Scunthorpe
--
Jon B
Above email address IS valid.
<http://www.bramley-computers.co.uk/>

[Paul Sture]

On 2016-02-16, eastender <em...@domain.com> wrote:
> I've just had an irate tradesman on the phone wondering why I haven't
> paid his bill he's emailed twice to my iCloud account. Except I didn't
> get them, and they are not in the junk folder.
>
> I then found this:
>
> http://www.macworld.com/article/2029570/silent-email-filtering-makes-icloud-an-unreliable-option.html
>
>
> 'Last November, our friends at Infoworld reported that Apple’s iCloud
> email system silently blocks emails containing certain phrases. And
> that hasn’t changed in the intervening months, as Macworld UK reports.'
>
> I hasten to add that 'barely legal teen' is not the phrase I'm wanting
> but I do work in the health sector so certain frank language is an
> issue.

My personal opinion is that any provider outside your own country isn't
the best place to host email or other services for health or legal
professionals. While client confidentiality is the driver behind that,
the question of reliability now raises its head.

> This is three years ago though, but is raising alarm bells as I use
> iCloud a lot now.
>
> Anyone else had issues like this - I cannot afford to not know about
> emails that get turned away by Apple.

Steve W's post indicates the problem is still present. More to the
point, they don't seem to see anything wrong with such filtering:

<http://forums.macrumors.com/threads/icloud-mail-silent-spam-filtering-and-reliability.1690763/page-3>

"Received a 'phone call from support today to say the scom.org filter
has finally been removed. The problem is that they don't accept there is
anything wrong with the way the mail filtering works..."

--
There are two hard things in computer science: cache invalidation,
naming, and off-by-one errors.

[Graeme Wall]

Am I just naive but what is wrong with the URL that Apple filter it out?

--
Graeme Wall
This account not read.

[Graeme Wall]

Or Penistone, but you could email Maidenhead…

[Martin S Taylor]

On Feb 17, 2016, Graeme Wall wrote
(in article <na1dbq$mh8$1...@dont-email.me>):

> > "Received a 'phone call from support today to say the scom.org filter
> > has finally been removed. The problem is that they don't accept there is
> > anything wrong with the way the mail filtering works..."
>
> Am I just naive but what is wrong with the URL that Apple filter it out?

If you don’t know what scomming is, Graeme, it’s best to keep it that
way. A practice so vile that it’s been blocked by the entire internet. The
day is coming, perhaps already here, when history will block the whole
concept of scomming from its collective memory.

It’s a bit like Gomorrahrising in that respect.

MST

[Martin S Taylor]

On Feb 17, 2016, Graeme Wall wrote

(in article <na1dda$mh8$2...@dont-email.me>):

> > God it sounds like 2001 again when you couldn't email Scunthorpe
>
> Or Penistone, but you could email Maidenhead…

Could you send emails on Saturday?

MST

[Paul Sture]

Looking at the keyboard it's close to "scim" and at a (physical) stretch
"scum".

DuckDuckGo gave me a suggestion of "Somali Community of Michigan" and
Acronym Finder gives me this little lot:

<http://www.acronymfinder.com/SCOM.html>

SCOM System Center Operations Manager (Microsoft)
SCOM Sweet Child O' Mine (Guns N' Roses song)
SCOM Supply Chain and Operations Management (education)
SCOM Software Center Operator Manual
SCOM Ski Club of Manchester (UK)
SCOM Software Center Operation Manual
SCOM School and the Community (university consortium program)
SCOM Scanning Confocal Optical Microscopy
SCOM Special Service, Communications Duties (US Navy)

1, 3 and 5 there seem eminently reasonable choice for a domain name
representing those fields, possibly No 8 as well if it represents
a scientific area of interest.

[Graeme Wall]

:-)

[Andy H]

eastender <em...@domain.com> wrote:

> 'Last November, our friends at Infoworld reported that Apple's iCloud
> email system silently blocks emails containing certain phrases. And
> that hasn't changed in the intervening months, as Macworld UK reports.'
>
> I hasten to add that 'barely legal teen' is not the phrase I'm wanting
> but I do work in the health sector so certain frank language is an
> issue.
>
> This is three years ago though, but is raising alarm bells as I use
> iCloud a lot now.
>
> Anyone else had issues like this - I cannot afford to not know about
> emails that get turned away by Apple.

Can't say I've ever come across this myself.

My initial thought was how annoying that is, but on reflection, I
started wondering is this just Apple, or is this more common - of course
many wouldn't know it was happening if they're filtering real spam and
nasty stuff.

--
Andy Hewitt

[Ray]

It's not only Apple, it's very common. Given that the vast majority of
email flying around the internet is spam, ISP's take the decision to
reject or delete everything they can before wasting everyone's bandwidth
delivering it to the recipient.
The usual way of doing that is by using the numerous blacklists of spam
domains plus manually implimented black and white lists on the mail
server.

[Andy H]

Ray <bugg...@outlook.com> wrote:

> Andy H <thewil...@icloud.com> wrote:
[..]

> > Can't say I've ever come across this myself.
> >
> > My initial thought was how annoying that is, but on reflection, I
> > started wondering is this just Apple, or is this more common - of course
> > many wouldn't know it was happening if they're filtering real spam and
> > nasty stuff.
>
> It's not only Apple, it's very common. Given that the vast majority of
> email flying around the internet is spam, ISP's take the decision to
> reject or delete everything they can before wasting everyone's bandwidth
> delivering it to the recipient.
> The usual way of doing that is by using the numerous blacklists of spam
> domains plus manually implimented black and white lists on the mail
> server.

That's pretty much what I thought - although I would have thought most
'spam' would be sent to your own Junk/Spam folder for evaluation.

I can certainly see that filtering out completely anything that is known
to be from malicious or scamming sources would be beneficial to all.
However, my thought is that there shoudl perhaps be an 'off' switch for
any filtering, so that an experienced user could do their own filtering.

--
Andy Hewitt

[Chris Ridd]

In SMTP there's a sort of "transaction" between 2 mail servers when
mail is being sent around. If the recipient mail server says "OK", then
the assumption is that it has saved it to storage and can't lose it, so
the first mail server can delete its copy. TBH it might be more than an
assumption, it might be part of the rules.

If you reject the mail during that transaction (you run out of disk
space, or you don't like something in the content) you can return a
failure to the sender and at least he knows it didn't send.

What Apple's doing is worse, it is accepting the mail and then not
delivering it without telling either end.

This is assuming that the OP's sender didn't get some sort of failure
and just ignore it.

--
Chris

[Steve W]

Apple did not reject the failed messages. They simply discarded them and
provided no notification to sender nor recipient.

If they want to filter spam they should reject and provide a link to
report false positives.

In this case it took hours talking to support on the 'phone and over six
weeks to get the filtering removed. This despite me providing logs from
my mail server showing them accepting the missing messages with tracking
information.

--
Steve W

[Paul Womar]

Steve W <new...@swid.co.uk.invalid> wrote:

> Apple did not reject the failed messages. They simply discarded them and
> provided no notification to sender nor recipient.
>
> If they want to filter spam they should reject and provide a link to
> report false positives.

The problem there is that many sender addresses are forged, so you end
up sending notifications to people who did not send anything, this is
called backscatter and a quick way to get yourself blacklisted.

Unfortunately lots of a dirty things have to happen to stop this junk.
--
-> The email address used in this message *IS* valid <-

[Andy H]

Yeah, I think this is the real issue, although perhaps Apple may have
gone about it slightly wrong for some users, in the main I think they
are trying to tackle it the best way they can.

I guess the trouble is that spammers and scammers are always going to be
a step or two ahead. Whatever we do, there's always going be some
genuine stuff that gets deleted, and some scammy stuff that gets through
it all.

I have been looking at my accounts a lot lately, and trying to decide
what's the best one to stick with. The choices being:

• ISP provided account - OK until I decide to change ISP (which is
reasonably often).
• Gmail - I just don't trust or like Google at this time, too many
questions over privacy for my liking, and it's become a bit too
commercialised, and I've never really warmed to the way its mail service
works.
• iCloud/MobileMe/.Mac - has always worked fairly well for me, and they
at least give the impression that they are doing all they can to
maintain privacy and security on all their accounts.
• Outlook/Hotmail - I've got an Outlook account now (mainly so I could
change my iTunes account from the Gmail one). Is this the one to watch
at the moment. My gut feeling is that Microsoft are finally giving users
a service with privacy and security.
• Yahoo - I deleted my account a short while ago (and even sacrificed my
Flickr account with it). Yahoo has never really worked well for me, with
terrible reliability, and poor history of security - I just got fed up
with the 'unable to connect to server' errors.

My conclusion is that you have choices, but only you can decide what
compromises to make. Of course it's easy to moan about poor services
from any of these providers, but remember they are all no cost to the
end user.

You could of course choose a paid for service, where you should expect a
service that is reliable, private, secure, and delivers any messages
that you choose to recieve (or send).

Of course most of that is anecdotal, just based on my own experience and
use of these accounts over many years.

--
Andy Hewitt

[Ian McCall]

On 2016-02-19 16:42:14 +0000, thewil...@icloud.com (Andy H) said:

> • Yahoo - I deleted my account a short while ago (and even sacrificed my
> Flickr account with it). Yahoo has never really worked well for me, with
> terrible reliability, and poor history of security - I just got fed up
> with the 'unable to connect to server' errors.

Just to note - I run a small mailing list, and Yahoo can be a nightmare
to deal with due to their spam policies breaking the way most mailing
lists work. I actually find the people there pretty helpful in talking
me through things when I need to deal with them so it's not that - it's
the technical policies that are the problem.


Cheers,
Ian


--
Check out Proto the album: <http://studioicm.com/proto/>

[Steve W]

Paul Womar <{$PW$}@womar.co.uk> wrote:

Rejecting unwanted mail does not cause backscatter. Most MX are
configured to do that.

--
Steve W

[Paul Womar]

It depends at which point you reject the mail. If you never accept it
then you are correct, if you accept it and then have to bounce it, you
are likely to cause problems.