“Apple has reportedly begun the filtering of outbound messages sent via its MobileMe service,” John Leyden reports for The Register.
“The upshot is that whatever email client a MobileMe user uses, their message will be blocked without notification, reportedly even if the offending content in question contains mild political criticism,” Leyden reports. “Reg reader Mike Conley, who was the first to tell us of the problem, said that one of three offending messages he sent was blocked because it mentioned the phrase ‘growing hostility against Frankfurt and Brussels.’ An email about civil unrest in Greece about the sovereign debt crisis/austerity budget was also dropped. Conley realised there was a problem because he sends messages to himself via bcc. He complained and one of the offending messages was transmitted only for the problem to reappear days later. As a result, Conley has decided to stop using the service after having been a loyal fan for more than 10 years.”
Leyden writes, “Generally speaking we’re much more inclined to attribute this sort of thing to a technical screw-up rather than a deliberate policy. The alternative is truly chilly.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: We just tested MobileMe, sending messages via both .mac and .me email address with the subject line text, “growing hostility against Frankfurt and Brussels” and the emails were not delivered. Following those, we sent messages via both .mac and .me email address with the subject line text, “innocuous test” and the emails were delivered promptly.
We also sent the following message via both .mac and .me email address with the subject line text, “forty-eight characters in subject line as a test” (same number of characters as “growing hostility against Frankfurt and Brussels”) and the emails were delivered promptly.
As Leyden states, “It’s very likely there’s some innocent explanation to this,” but until Apple publicly and clearly explains what is going on here, Do not use Apple’s MobileMe email service.
We have sent a an inquiry to Apple and will update this article when and if they respond.
UPDATE: 11:44am EDT: We just resent messages via both .mac and .me email address with the subject line text, “growing hostility against Frankfurt and Brussels” and the emails were delivered. The emails we sent earlier that were exactly the same compositions still have not arrived.
Therefore, something has changed in the last half hour and/or the reliability of MobileMe email is questionable. Use at your own risk.
wow… I was going crazy last week because of something very similar to this, We had an email conversation regarding a charity in Haiti, we have mention a couple of high profiles names in the subject line and some of the email wouldn’t go trough sent from my .mac account, I called Apple, all my test messages sent fine but the one regarding Haiti where all lost.
This is absolutely crazy!
Anyone who has used MobileMe for e-mail knows how glitchy it is. Mail sent and never received was nothing new for me when I was a member.
Sent the subject line “growing hostility against Frankfurt and Brussels”:
-via .mac and .me to my Hover Mail sub-domain .. Not received
-Sent from Hovermail to .me/.Mac .. Not received
-sent from gmail to .me .. Not received
Using imap for each
Rather than Apple filtering the mail, it seems just as likely that some of you people are on a terrorist watch list. 🙂
in OS X 1.0 through 2.0 Mail would not send email that had a return on a line at the 78th character (the end of an ascii line of code).
it was fixed eventually except in CJK character sets it also cropped up (CJK are Chinese-Japanese-Korean fonts)
this is likely a similar problem of some sort.
It’s likely a server-side issue in this case though, as the behavior is identical using both webmail and Mail.app.
I tried it and it worked fine. Also tried subject lines like, “I hate gays”, “liberals suck because they are stupid”, “fighting in Sudan” and a few others and everything was received. My guess is this is a spam filter issue.
Did my comment get censored?
How ironic, if so…
It was a statement that I am opposed to censorship, especially in private conversation.
I sent a test message to myself, with “growing hostility against Frankfurt and Brussels” asbith the subject line and the body, and I received it in seconds.
I sent my message from my iPhone, if that makes a difference.
This is likely just a problem with Apple’s Spam filters people. Relax. Report it to Apple and let them work it out.
I suspect a glitchy spam filter.
went thru fine. No problem.
I just sent a new message, timestamped.
Still has not shown up..
I’ve tested and even the phrase “growing hostility against” (no quotes) in the subject and body will make the message forward fail…
In both subject and body, using Mail.app on Snow Leopard:
– “growing hostility” is fine,
– “hostility” is fine,
– “hostility against” is fine, but
– “growing hostility against” fails.
I didn’t test them all, but in several tests, MobileMe webmail mirrored the behavior with Mail.app.
Like a couple people have pointed out, it’s likely a misconfigured spam filter, but it’s still very interesting.
– “growing hostility against” also failed on iPhone
Wonder if THIS phrase is the culprit?
maybe the spam filter has been fixed, but like a domain server change it takes a while to fully clear out.
I think we should try the subject line:
“Growing hostility towards Apple illustrated in hokie anti-MobileMe campaign”
🙂
I tried the “growing hostility against Frankfurt and Brussels” in subject and body…and it was not delivered.
I then tried “growing hostility in Egypt” and I got that one.
Very strange…
how about a little real journalism here, like, you know, getting the facts before jumping to conclusions, or even repeating alarmist rumors?
the Register is a notorious Apple-bashing POS rag. and MDN … well.
spam filters are always problematic. there is no perfect algorithm. the one at my company blocks some stuff for reasons you can’t figure out once in a while.
actually the register was just reporting on this from another source.. Macintouch.com
if you read that article, it’s been going on for a while, and there are other terms that are getting blocked from outgoing emails.
but “how about a little real journalism here, like, you know, getting the facts before jumping to conclusions”
seems to fit you… since YOU didn’t get any facts…
what are you talking about? i read the article. the linked Register article plainly states: “Reg reader Mike Conley, who was the first to tell us of the problem …” and then later links to the MIT forum (not an “article”) Conley started.
none of which relates to the point anyway: get the facts. all we know now from individual reports is, sometimes that phrase is blocked and sometimes it is not. we don’t know why/how. we certainly do not know if it is intentional – the rumor – or an artifact of a spam filter or maybe an “objectionable content” filter.
these are all good questions, whether YOU like them or not.
the Register just REPORTED what they were told. THEY didn’t make the story up. they REPORTED the story FROM another source.
the Macintouch thread dates back to the 1st. if you do other searching, you’ll find the guy talking about this on june 30th.
I said they were reporting on it FROM another source. which THEY DID….
and if you read, MDN and others HAVE been able to reproduce this.
when the Register posted the story, they were the first big news site to actually report it. and it looks like it didn’t take long for apple to correct it.
None of which relates to the point anyway.
perhaps you missed the initial MDN headline: “Do Not Use Mobile Me Email Service”. which they took down with the update. that was pure rumor mongering.
Which if you could READ…. was a Quote.
“As Leyden states, “It’s very likely there’s some innocent explanation to this,” but until Apple publicly and clearly explains what is going on here, Do not use Apple’s MobileMe email service.”
that’s irrelevant. putting such an inflammatory statement in a headline with no disclaimer or qualification is rumor mongering ipso facto.
you just can’t face it. good night.
Both ways worked within 15 seconds for me to and from several of my Gmail addresses and my mobileme. My sister got message thru her mobileme acct and so did my brother in law. No problem whatsoever. I think this is BS.
Exactly as you describe. Sent via me.com through desktop Apple mail, I copied and pasted your “hostility” and “forty-eight” subjects into my subject line. Sure enough, the first is lost in the ozone (not recieved and no Bcc) and the second came through instantly.
It’s probably some ‘News of the World’ journalist hacking into the email system, reading your messages and then deleting some of them to make room for more 😉
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-14036673
NewsCorp/RupertMurdoch/N.o.t.W. scum that they are
I just tried sending the sample test message. Successful when sent via my TIme Warner Cable account. Message was received almost immediately. The message sent via my .mac /.me account has still not come through after 20 minutes.
My hypothesis:The subject line ended up in some spam filter. Apple’s filtering spam rather aggressively. I still cannot send email messages to a .mac/.me account with my office phone number in the signature. (Talked with Apple about that. Yes, it’s the phone number triggering, but we cannot do anything about that, sorry. I suspect that it is because of my office mate a few years back who used the same phone number. But he was also prone to hackers. He had the worst infection of his PC that I have ever seen. He couldn’t resist free offers.)
during my earlier searches on this today, i found Apple also started filtering emails with no subject, and a single link in the body of the email…
I, too, could not replicate the problem. The message I sent to myself with the offending subject line went through fine. So did a test message with the subject line: “stinking nazi motherfuckers eat christians for breakfast”. Very offensive, but no problem getting delivered.
I just sent “growing turd in redmond to be released soon” to myself. Not only was the message delivered without issue, I also receieved an automated response that reads, “uh huh.”
Instead of “growing hostility against Frankfurt and Brussels”, try using “growing hostility against Frankfurters and Brussel Sprouts”. Burp!
# 1 Issue is that Frankfurters and Brussel sprouts do NOT go together. Try entering ketchup, and don’t even think about spam and brussel sprouts.
Mmmmmm, Spammmmm!!!
If they thought something was terrorist material, they should flag it internally to proper authorities to follow up on, but I think it still has to be sent.
Legally, i’m sure that you are correct. But legality is evidently irrelevant where our esteemed gov’t is concerned. Ditto for the justice system.