Why are bounce rates higher for iCloud email addresses compared to other email providers?
Summary
What email marketers say10Marketer opinions
Email marketer from Litmus explains that Apple's Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) impacts email metrics. While MPP doesn't directly cause bounces, it can skew sender data and make it harder to identify and fix deliverability issues, potentially leading to increased bounce rates over time.
Marketer from Email Geeks explains that iCloud has very low storage unless a user pays for it. Also, users might be using Apple's private relay 'hide my email addresses' feature and turn them off without unsubscribing. Every Apple ID has an iCloud email, often used as a throwaway email address.
Email marketer from EmailGeek Community Forum shares that low sender reputation can lead to higher bounce rates, especially with stricter email providers like iCloud. Poor engagement (low open/click rates) signals to iCloud that the emails are unwanted, resulting in increased bouncing.
Email marketer from MailerCheck highlights that while email content doesn't always factor into bounce rates, email addresses get blacklisted by iCloud if they are consistently sending unsolicited emails to their users. Thus, the content needs to also be high quality to prevent ending up on block lists that could cause bounces.
Email marketer from Mail সেন্ড Blog shares that iCloud places a high emphasis on sender reputation. Senders with low reputation scores (due to spam complaints or low engagement) are more likely to experience higher bounce rates.
Marketer from Email Geeks shares that after looking at several hundred million deliveries to iCloud.com sent by AWeber users, there is no change in overall perm or temp fail issues, indicating they have not recently purged users or changed anything.
Email marketer from Reddit mentions that iCloud's spam filters are more aggressive than other providers. Even emails that aren't overtly spammy might get flagged and bounce if they trigger certain filters or lack proper authentication.
Email marketer from SenderGuardian Blog explains that iCloud can implement temporary blocks or rate limiting if it detects suspicious sending patterns from a particular IP address. This can lead to temporary bounces, even if the sender is legitimate.
Email marketer from Stack Overflow explains that iCloud is likely to bounce emails from senders with misconfigured SPF records. SPF records prevent unauthorized senders from using your domain to send emails, leading to better deliverability and avoiding bounces.
Email marketer from Neil Patel's Blog suggests that iCloud offers limited free storage. When users reach their storage limit, incoming emails bounce back to the sender, inflating bounce rates compared to providers with more generous storage.
What the experts say2Expert opinions
Expert from Email Geeks shares that they have run into false positive blocking at iCloud before. The error messages they saw referred to spam or policy blocks, not quotas.
Expert from Spam Resource explains that Apple has implemented stricter spam filtering, especially for iCloud addresses. This stricter filtering is more likely to bounce messages that other providers might accept, leading to a higher bounce rate.
What the documentation says4Technical articles
Documentation from ReturnPath highlights that maintaining a clean email list is key to reducing bounce rates. High bounce rates with iCloud and other ISPS are a result of too many invalid addresses, which causes the receiving server to flag you as a spammer.
Documentation from Apple Support highlights that if users set up a custom email domain with iCloud Mail, incorrect DNS settings (SPF, DKIM, DMARC) can cause emails to bounce. iCloud's stricter enforcement of these standards could lead to higher bounce rates than other providers.
Documentation from RFC Editor explains that SMTP reply codes like '552' often indicate storage quota exceeded errors. This suggests that a high percentage of iCloud users hitting quota limits could contribute to elevated bounce rates.
Documentation from Apple Support states that iCloud accounts come with a limited amount of free storage, shared across iCloud Drive, Photos, Mail, and device backups. When this storage is full, new emails can bounce.