Apple Blocks Emails for Objectionable Content

Posted on July 8, 2011 by Action for Freedom — Leave a comment

Apple has been silently deleting outgoing mail that contains unacceptable words and phrases. What sorts of words and phrases? Good question! Apple won’t say. It definitely doesn’t like political yammering. Shut up, hippies.

One email that has repeatedly triggered a silent block on outgoing messages from me.com reads as follows:

The authoritarian Governments in Syria, Greece, Saudi Arabia and Yemen continue to oppress and massacre their own citizens. Their manipulative and combative attempts at controlling the media and their citizens are unethical and illegal. They continue to oppress its own citizens through beatings, harassment, jailing and killings.

Stop the oppression of innocent Arab People!!!

Take a stand against Authoritarian Oppressive Regimes!

Equal Rights to all people!

Cult of Mac attempted to send that message from the me.com web interface to three non Apple accounts; it was blocked each time. Messages sent with different content, or sent via Apple’s native Mail app, went through fine to the same addresses. Cult of Mac theorizes that Apple is trying to filter spam. The problem is, the user is never notified that they were blocked, or why.

Apple seemed to acknowledge the content based filtering in an email to a user of the Macintouch forums, where who quoted an Apple customer service rep as saying,

“I understand the wish to see some feedback from our servers regarding messages which are blocked, however doing so isn’t something I imagine will happen soon. Providing a bounce back for messages we block as spam provides an essential feedback loop for spaMobileMeers. By not providing one, we keep them in the dark a little bit more.”

So Apple is purposely keeping its customers in the dark about which emails go through and which ones didn’t, opening itself up to more charges that it loves to censor content just like it has, repeatedly and regrettably, on the iPhone and iPad. On the other hand, what were Me.com email users thinking? Did you guys even bother to read the Apple Acceptable Email Guidelines? Did you spring for AppleCare, Unlimited Self Expression Edition? No? Well then stop whining. Apple loves it some control.

Written by Ryan Tate

Sourced from gawker.com