Increased bounce rate for our most recent campaign due to Apple domains

Question

Hi,We got a few thousand ‘554 5.7.1 [CS01] Message rejected due to local policy. Please visit https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204137’ responses from Apple-based email addresses (icloud.com, mac.com, me.com) from our most recent campaign. Never had this before, and the content of the campaign was not markedly different from usual.We comply with all policies, have DKIM records, subscribe to dmarc reports, have an unsub link, have a sending domain, have double opt-in etc etc.There is not much concrete info out there on why this happens, some forum chatter says it’s an intermittent issue that ‘just happens’ sometimes. All are in agreement that contacting Apple about it is a complete waste of time: they will give no answer beyond the general guidance in the support link in the bounce response.Does anyone here have any info on why this happens and how to avoid it?Many thanks,G

mcole · Accepted Answer

We experienced the same issue, 10x our usual bounce rate. I got in touch with Klaviyo support and they shared this

From September 9th at 5pm EST to September 11th at 12:00 EST we detected a block by Apple on one of our four shared tracking domains. Bounces that were incurred due to this would have been categorized as Soft Bounces so please resend any emails to icloud.net addresses and they will deliver.

In order to add an extra layer of prevention from being affected by an issue with a shared tracking domain being blocked again we would advise that you set up Dedicated Click Tracking. This will change the tracking domain used in your Klaviyo email to one that matches your brand.

KeviSunshine · Answer

Hi @dartacus,We’ve seen this intermittently with different email providers (Comcast, Yahoo, Google). My running theory is that it’s Klaviyo that is being blocked– it’s not you or your email content. The email still technically comes from Klaviyo’s mail servers (their IP address).So my theory is that there are‘bad actors’ that use Klaviyo tosendout spam, which causesa bad reputation, and our legitimate emails to be blocked. And then the providers’ softwarerealizes (??) it’sblocking legitimate Klaviyo emails and they “target” their block to the domain rather than the IP....that would make sense, right? I am curious what other people think (or know!).Best,Kevin.

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