topic Re: icloud Contacts who have been Hard Bounced in Email Deliverability

icloud Contacts who have been Hard Bounced

HopmogWebmaster — Thu, 17 Oct 2024 19:24:18 GMT

problem is that a recent marketing email was sent out and all contacts with an Apple email account have received a Hard Bounce and so will no longer receive any of our emails. The reason given was

Rejected by recipient's email security filter

POLICY 554 5.7.1 [HM07] Message rejected due to local policy. Please visit https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204137

We are only on the Free version so cannot unbounce a contact. Hubspot granted us a trial Pro Plus upgrade buy yhat only allowed me to unbounce 10 addresses

As a not for profit club we cannot afford a monthly subscription just to be able to unbounce emails sent to an Apple address, when all other providers accepted the email no problem

Any ideas greatfully received

Re: icloud Contacts who have been Hard Bounced

BérangèreL — Fri, 18 Oct 2024 09:16:58 GMT

Hi @HopmogWebmaster, I hope that you are well!

Thank you for asking the Community!

From the Apple article that was present in your post, it seems that the message was rejected as a function of a local (email client-specific) email blocking policy. This would be associated with junk mail filtering performed by Apple's Mac-based Mail client, which is also enabled by default in iCloud.

The fact that such a large number of messages were blocked does suggest that junk mail filtering was triggered "locally" (i.e. in iCloud, rather than at the level of Apple's overall email service) as a function of a rule change or spam detection algorithm flagging this particular message as potential spam.
But this is difficult to speculate on without confirmation from the recipient's email service. So, I'd recommend opening a ticket with iCloud to have more information.

If you were to unbounce contacts, you'll need to have confirmation from each recipient that the policy bounce was not intentional on their part and that they do want to continue receiving mail from your company.

Policy-related bounces are almost directly analogous to spam reports, in that they're considered highly intentional on the part of the recipient (or their email service), so continuing to send mail to an address that has hard bounced in this way could have a severely detrimental effect on your deliverability to affected domains.

You'll need to collect a list of contacts who both bounced from this send and gave you direct permission to begin sending to them again; you'll also want to be sure that they've taken measures to allowlist or otherwise "unblock" mail sent by your company and/or from your domain.

I would recommend connecting with HubSpot Technical Support, as Support is included in your subscription and they will be able to provide real-time assistance for this matter, including hopping on a screenshare if necessary.

I'd love to ask our Top Experts: Hi @Jnix284, @Phil_Vallender and @Josh can you think of ideas to get these additional contacts unbounced to help @HopmogWebmaster, please?

Thank you very much and have a great day and weekend!

Best,
Bérangère

Re: icloud Contacts who have been Hard Bounced

HopmogWebmaster — Mon, 21 Oct 2024 18:00:40 GMT

I've not had any feedback on un bouncing those of our members who have been hit by this. It appears that a link we had in the email allowing members to download a pdf document was the cause, because removing that link allowed the email through Apple's servers.

It maybe that we will have to contact the members concerned to ask if they have a different email address that we can use.