Hi L.D.
I hope your clients have found a solution... This has apparently been going on for years.
Others have reported similar experiences in the news:
- http://www.mcelhearn.com/apples-silent-email-filtering-is-just-plain-wrong/
- http://www.macworld.com/article/2029570/silent-email-filtering-makes-icloud-an-u nreliable-option.html
So, those who are looking for a solution that involves continuing to use iCloud for important emails are kind of out of luck... We've been dealing with the same issue ourselves at my company. We tried to work around it but sadly we've finally decided to discontinue using iPhones and iPads for business.
Unfortunately, the silent filtering is a serious problem. In our case, we forwarded our main company emails to the the iCloud.com accounts which were loaded onto the executives' iPads and iPhones. Things worked alright at first, but later we noticed that we weren't receiving important emails. The emails that went missing weren't from spammy domains either. They were university emails, government emails, and emails from major US corporations. One of those government agencies eventually contacted one of our executives via a different method, and that is how we found out that the emails being forwarded to the iCloud.com accounts were being silently filtered.
In our case, for security reasons, we don't load company emails directly onto mobile devices, so we were forwarding company emails to the iCloud.com domain, but when important messages started going missing this became a huge inconvenience and potential security risk (as employees were tempted to load their work emails directly onto the devices - a no no here). We also tried everything to get a resolution from Apple, but thus far nothing has been done. We have not been able to ascertain if this is an issue that Apple intends to fix or if they even consider this a problem.
Unfortunately, this makes using iCloud.com accounts for business related emails (or any important emails, really) a very bad idea. I wish I could offer a solution, but the reality is that those who rely on iCloud.com for company mail will probably end up looking flakey or irresponsible at some point. Those who are sending you the messages will be unfamiliar with silent filtering as most email providers simply don't bounce emails without providing a return message with a reason for why. In Apple's case they filter emails that contain blacklisted phrases as well as emails that come from blacklisted domains. So, it is possible to receive some emails and not others from the same sender. This will again reflect badly on the business relying on iCloud, not on Apple itself, as most will expect to receive some sort of notification that the email has bounced.
The best solution is to go with something like Blackberry, or one of the other business oriented phones... For those who care about security, the blackphone is also a pretty nice option, and there are so many Android phones to choose from that clients can surely find options there.
It's no secret that Apple has one of the best UIs out there, and we really loved how our iPads and iPhones seamlessly integrated with our other mac products, until of course - they didn't... :-/
