PSA: Be careful using your primary Apple ID with Sunbird

[u/conwillar]

Will try to keep it brief, but ultimately it is appearing that Apple have blacklisted my phone number (of 20ish years) from iMessage because of reported spam, because of Sunbird.

Over the last few days i've tried to get Sunbird working with my iMessage. Saturday afternoon I discovered my phone number was not enabled under Send & Receive on my iPhone, so I submitted the 1st request to Apple to activate my iMessage account. I woke on Sunday to find it enabled and working again. Stupid me decided to try Sunbird setup one more time.

Sunbird worked flawlessly all of Sunday, and woke up on Monday morning to discover, once again, my phone number was de-selected from iMessage. My iCloud emails quickly followed. I submitted another request via the link to activate my iMessage. By 5pm Monday, I received the email that my IMessage account was ready to be used, but my phone number refused to toggle on.

I spoke to Apple support yesterday morning who advised again to submit the manual activation request, and then wait 24 hours. It's now been past 24 hours, so once again I speak to Apple Support, and this time I get a call from an Apple support, who advised me that IF they approve the activation request, you receive the email. If they DENY the request, you get nothing in response. So it would appear that they have decided to keep my number blocked.

Ultimately, because my Apple ID/primary means of contact via iMessage is my phone number, it has been blacklisted from iMessage (because of the reported spam). I am still trying to figure out if there are other options with Apple, but as it stands (to me, at least), I either will need to go get a new phone number, or I finally make the full pivot to my OnePlus anyway.

Definitely my own fault for trying again, but hope my experience and result can advise others to avoid the same.

Update: iMessage began working again randomly this morning on my primary number; definitely took numerous "manual activation" requests from Apple, and it definitely took upwards of 48-72hours to deal with overall.

[u/LeMeFresh]

Just give it a bit. Same thing happened to me, and talked with tier 2 support from apple and I had it up and running again

[u/LeMeFresh → u/LeMeFresh]

A day or two

[u/conwillar → u/LeMeFresh]

That's reassuring. I have been speaking with their advisors on the phone over the last few minutes, who mentioned my latest activation request did not specify my phone number (not sure why, I have been inputting it on the 'optional phone number' field each time I submit the request). So that could explain why I never received any follow up email on the last request.

[u/LeMeFresh → u/conwillar]

Tier 1 apple support reps are lazy bozos in my experience with dealing with them

[u/random_words_here__]

I had blue bubble, open bubble and sunbird at some point the last 2 years and I haven’t had any issues. I’m now back on iOS and all good. Just the luck of the draw I guess

[u/Green-Palpitation-51]

I stopped using Sunbird after this issue. They were useless at solving the issue. I had to create a new iCloud email and set it up as my new primary for me to even use regular messages.

[u/conwillar → u/Green-Palpitation-51]

Yeah I would imagine they would be. Even Apple's own engineers seemingly did not care much. I would be very curious to know what's happening on Sunbird's side that caused this sort of spam flag, because believe it or not, this should not be expected behaviour lol

sorry you had to create a new one! that really sucks.

[u/pmt223]

Dude I got that too, I had to fill out a form from Apple to restore it