Esoteric Question

First let me say that I have been working with computers for 53 years and SpamSieve is the absolute best spam filter I have ever used. I suffered with Microsoft products for the last few decades of my professional life, but since I grew up with Unix, I am a happy Apple power user.
Unfortunately what I’ve found is that somehow iCloud email and perhaps Comcast email, etc. is causing emails from one of my iCloud accounts to be sent to receivers spam boxes, because that account has the word “junk” in the middle of the name. I even tried to alias the iCloud account email, but those mails are being spam filtered by an iCloud receiver and/or as I say a Comcast email account. While this is certainly not a SpamSieve issue, I was wondering if you can comment on a solution for me. I cannot really change the iCloud ID. Thanks !

How do you know that’s the reason? It sounds unlikely to me.

I did some experiments, same mail content sent from two different iCloud accounts, one with the “junk” in the id. Even a cc to myself, I believe iCloud moves to junk folder. I have spam sieve putting spam in a folder called spam sieve, but I also have a junk folder that gets populated, I’m assuming by iCloud and my ISP.

I don’t think the experiment necessarily shows that because there are also other differences between the accounts. I find this explanation unlikely because:

  1. It makes no sense that iCloud and Comcast would work that way.

  2. I have seen many examples of people who have “junk” in their username (including test accounts of my own), and I have never heard of this happening before.

Regardless, if that is what’s happening, it seems like there’s nothing you could do except to get each recipient to add the sender address to their allowlist.

Michael, I certainly don’t want to argue with you - all I know is that the problem I described seems to be affecting even more of my receivers. In the past it was just gmail recipients and that clued me to the name. My iCloud id is something like “junkabc@icloud.com
I was hoping you ran into this before and possibly had another solution. As I said, even using an iCloud alias to that ID doesn’t help, so perhaps spam filters are looking at the senders ID. Frankly, I thought spam sieve also did.

I see this on the internet that seems to describe my issue:

Sender names also happen to be one of the first things spam filters evaluate before allowing an email to enter an inbox. If a spam filter perceives a sender name to be potentially spammy or harmful, the spam filter will block the message from ever entering the inbox.Aug 17, 2022

Yes, SpamSieve and other filters consider the sender name. But that means they look for addresses and keywords that have a history of spam. Spammers don’t use “junk” as their return address, so there is no reason for that to be treated as spammy by filters.

The fact that using a different return address didn’t help is evidence that the problem is related to the content of your messages or perhaps the iCloud outgoing mail server, not the address.

I wasn’t clear. A different iCloud email worked. The Alias one mapped on iCloud to the junk one didn’t.
I’m convinced it is because the address has the word junk embedded. Rejection first started with recipients using gmail and has latent spread to iCloud and Comcast reciepients.

But ok, this has nothing to do with spam sieve. At least spam sieve has teaching ability- more difficult to create rules on iCloud and Comcast.