Action Required: Apple Domains Update Results In Bounced / Bulked Emails

Recently, Apple made a change in their DMARC authentication policy which affects people sending from mac.com, me.com, or icloud.com email addresses.

If you use a mac.com, me.com, or icloud.com in the “from” address of your email campaigns, you may have been experiencing a recent increase in bounces or mail being sent to the bulk folder.

A policy change was made by Apple to combat spoofing attacks, but one of the side effects has been that some of the emails you send from your Constant Contact account might not get delivered properly.

(Note: All email service providers are impacted by this change; it is not isolated to Constant Contact.)

This means that if you’re sending emails through an email service provider (ESP) — like Constant Contact — using an Apple domain address as your “from” address, your email will be rejected or delivered to the spam/bulk folder by any internet service provider (ISP) that checks it against Apple’s new authentication policy.

Make sure your emails are being delivered

Choose and use a “from” address that is associated with a domain you control rather than a free domain (e.g., john@companyname.com rather than john@mac.com). This not only limits any deliverability issues, it also gives your business the legitimate exposure it deserves. If you had been looking for the right time to upgrade to using an email address at your own domain, now is the time!

We understand that not all of our customers will have this option, so we have put a fix into our system to help you:

Going forward we will rewrite the “from”address whenever we see a customer using one of the affected domains. (We have been doing this for yahoo.com for over two years.) Your “reply-to” address will still remain the same so any responses to your campaign will still go to you. The rewrite will look something like this:

Original: mybusiness@icloud.com

Updated: mybusiness+icloud.com@ccsend.com