iCloud Not Receiving Mail Reliably from Gmail
File this one under the “nice to know but not much to be done about it” category. Over the past week, we and many other iCloud and Gmail users have started to notice that some, but not all, messages from Gmail to iCloud have been delayed, sometimes for days, or even rejected after too much time has passed. A number of threads at Apple Support Communities (such as this one) have talked through all the variables, and it simply seems that there’s something deep within the guts of iCloud that is having trouble receiving mail from Gmail. Some people have commented that email delivery from other services seems to be affected as well, but we haven’t yet been able to track down
any patterns there.
The Apple Services, Stores, and iCloud status page makes no mention of the problem; it’s conceivable that these issues are related to the all-day Apple service outage on 11 March 2015.
As I noted, there doesn’t seem to be any way to work around this problem. Neither Gmail nor iCloud offer users any insight into or much control over their inner workings, so we’ll just have to wait and let Apple’s and Google’s email administrators figure out and solve the problem.
In the meantime, if you have a non-iCloud email address, it would be worth telling your Gmail-based correspondents to use it instead. And if you forward your Gmail account to iCloud, consider logging in to Gmail directly to check mail there until this is resolved.
thanks for posting this! i thought i was going crazy!
Probably not related but FYI my Gmail messages as of a few days ago are arriving much sooner on my iPhone than on my Mac running Apple Mail. Just a FWIW.
Adam, thanks for this info.
My wife received an email saying that she ha a Dropbox file from a friend. That friend has a new grandchild, so it was opened. It is obvious it is a phishing dud, but not obvious what will be the effect. Her contacts have been emailed with the same bogus Dropbox email. Now no email is getting through, either via Google or my Apple account or as cable email.
Your problem is entirely unrelated to this article, Ian, but it's very concerning. Your wife should immediately change her email and Dropbox passwords, along with the passwords of any other accounts that share the same passwords.
You may need to set up those email accounts again, or even restore from a backup.
I get my Gmail directly using Apple Mail on my Mac and iOS devices, so have not seen that problem, but had problems with iTunes Match and iTunes Radio where the Music App was unable to find the music from iCloud and would rapidly skip over multiple tracks. As of last night that seems to be fixed. Anyone else have that problem?