All Emails to Apple domains (icloud, mac, me) bounce

Question

I use a service that sends my email campaigns via my domain via SES to my subscribers. On July 3rd, I sent an announcement out to all my subscribers and immediately received a large number of bounces. Upon further examination, all of the bounces were to Apple email domains, i.e. me.com, mac.com and icloud.com. I recognized several email addresses as active, current subscribers and customers, so these were not abandoned or mailbox full type bounces.

I checked several black list databases to see if my domain was on them, and they all turned up clear.

I then did some searches and came across this thread on Reddit, and a few other people report this happening too:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/gsuite/comments/1bzf4a5/postmortem_all_emails_sent_to_apple_email/]()

I tried his suggestion of removing any links to the website domain in case there was malware. Resent the mail to all the bounced addresses today and sure enough, all the apple domain addresses bounced again, while other temporary bounces to other domains all got delivered!

Additional Info: One of the email addresses I recognized that bounced is a customer who just purchased right before the email announcement went out. The transactional order emails sent from my domain go through Google Workspace. So his order confirmation email sent to his icloud.com email address (via Google, not SES) without bouncing. This leads me to believe that the bounced emails are central to SES. My email policies (SPF, DKIM, and DMARC are all correctly in place and have been for a long time).

Has anyone run into this issue? If so, what is the fix? Thank you!

Max Clements · Answer

AWS SES Provides notifications that you can process and handle for bounces and complaints. You can read about this here: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/ses/latest/dg/notification-contents.html

Jeff Barr also published a blog back in 2012 when this feature was made available detailing the types of information you can find in the SNS notification from SES for Bounces/Complaints. It is worth reading: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/programmable-feedback-notification-for-the-simple-email-service/

Lastly consider looking at https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/messaging-and-targeting/handling-bounces-and-complaints/ which details how to handle bounces and complaints in an automated fashion.

In short, examining the SNS bounce notifications from SES once you have set them up - will reveal why iCloud are bouncing your mail.

MikeDC · Answer

Update: I contacted icloudadmin@apple.com, explained the situation and they replied in just over two hours, on a Sunday! with:

> Thank you for your message. We have investigated your report and made appropriate changes. Please try resending and let us know if you still encounter the issue.
Best regards,
iCloud Mail Team

So this morning, I created a segment with only the apple emails, sent it off and they were all delivered, no bounces! I don't know what they did on their end but whatever it was, it fixed the problem. Kudos to Apple!

I'm not familiar with SNS, so I will have to look into that, thank you

All Emails to Apple domains (icloud, mac, me) bounce

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