Apple had an outage (or some unknown problem) yesterday that made the iCloud account I use for email unavailable. Instead of Ventura being straightforward and popping up a notice that “The iCloud account blahblahblah is unavailable. Try again later”, I got wind of the issue when Mail started popping up undecipherable error messages. It turned out that those messages were in response to SpamSieve attempting to exercise rules to move blacklisted messages to Junk. Of course, typical for Apple, the messages explained nothing about this. I also saw that DEVONthink stopped syncing with iCloudKit; again, with DEVONthink’s usual gobbledygook error messages.
Finally, after a few hours of this, I lit up a chat message with Apple Support. The first difficulty with that, was that the agent seemed not to be able to write cogent English sentences so it took several tries to figure out what the agent was telling me. Then, the chat went on for 30 minutes, with slow responses, before the agent told me to try Support again tomorrow when someone who knew how to address the issue might be available !?!
Eventually, after 12 hours, Mail started flowing; DEVONthink’s CloudKit sync restarted. Throughout the issue, Apple System Status never indicated any outages of any kind, and my other iCloud account (for purchases) was working just fine.
Just another confirmation that behind the caring, competent, and happy face that Apple presents in WWDC and elsewhere, there is poor service delivery and frequently incompetent support; leaving the customer hanging without access to their data and no clue as to what will happen next. (Not that the competition is any better.)
I knew that Apple pays hundreds of $ millions to AWS and Google for storage but I’ve never read any specifics on what they store there.
imap.mail.me.com pings to Akamai Technologies which provides Apple’s icloud private relay. Like all things iCloud it’s hard to know how anything works.
Sorry you are having trouble. IMO, this explains the problem.
"Apple has never offered an email hosting solution for businesses. They know what they’re good at, and they don’t want to waste their time trying something new just because it’s another service to sell. "
Hasn’t that pretty much been their entire M.O. for the last decade or so? AppleCare+, Apps, iTunes, Apple Music, Apple Pay, iCloud, Apple Card, Apple TV+, Apple Arcade - were they ‘good at’ any of these things before they started them? Warranty, App Store, music sales, music streaming, video streaming, payments, finance, storage/sync, gaming. I’m not saying they should have fired up enterprise email hosting, but I can’t see why not. I think it was much more of an analysis of cost vs revenue. It didn’t have the same sort of profit margin needed.
“Stuff happens”. Sure. All the time. That’s not what I’m griping about, if you read my post.
The lack of clear messaging within macOS; the incompetent Support service in this case; and the apparent rot in Apple’s service model behind the facade of smiling executives and advertising – that’s what bugs me about the situation. Servers fail all the time – but there’s no message telling me that’s what happened, and no way to get at least an high level ETA for restoration.
Yes, I understand. I thought the fact that Apple doesn’t offer business accounts shows that they don’t want to be held to service level agreements, etc. that are required when you deal with businesses. Apparently their goal is to be ‘good enough’ for casual users.
IMO you are correct, Apple has no excuse for not being among the best at everything they do. But I like participating in the forum and don’t want to be too critical of Apple, too often.
IMO there is nothing wrong with iCloud email. Mail.app and iCloud mail are reliable products for most people. But Apple, for example, doesn’t offer much in the way of server side rules, etc. that people on this forum would like. And they don’t provide service level agreements, etc. that businesses demand.
Today most businesses choose Microsoft or Google as their email/cloud services provider. I evaluated both for my former employer before I retired a few years ago and determined either would be an excellent solution. They choose Google Workspace.
A friend got me an invitation to Gmail during their closed beta and I’m still a user. And Google has been hosting my personal domains since around 2007.
Maybe. I don’t cut Apple much slack and I’m a Google Workspace user. That makes me persona non grata with some people. I don’t want to get voted off the island.
I’ve run email for a number of domains for 20+ years. The only time I had any issues was the year (last year) I decided to move a domain to icloud. It taught me a very simple lesson, DON’T.
Personally, IMO anything that has iCloud at the back of it is going to cause you problems. Until Apple sort iCloud, these types of problems will continue. This forum is littered with posts about iCloud issues.
The Amazon server issues seem to have lasted over 24 hours and been widespread, and yet the only app I use to date that even emailed to tell me there was an issue was Zapier (and they emailed twice - once to acknowledge the problem, and once to give the all clear and explain how they had responded). I know other apps I use had problems, but no-one else has sent an email to confirm this.
