Is Apple censoring its users’ personal political communications? It appears so, according to several users of its MobileMe e-mail service.
There are conflicting reports. Some users on a Mac forum have recently said that they’ve been trying to send political messages about the repressive government actions in Greece and the Middle East with their web-based MobileMe accounts, but the messages’ recipients never received them.
CultofMac (a site I occasionally contribute to) picked up the comments, and conducted its own test.
John Brownlee, the site’s editor, found that the political messages were blocked from being sent from a MobileMe web account, but not from a regular Apple e-mail program on the desktop.
Several users on the Mac forum note that the filtering system is probably meant to block spammers from abusing Apple’s e-mail system. Others wanted to be notified about the mail blockage.
As Brownlee writes:
Presumably, MobileMe’s outgoing email filtering is a preventive measure to keep spam from being sent through Apple’s webmail servers. However, since there’s no information on what content triggers Apple’s anti-spam conditions, and since the offending emails aren’t returned to sender with an error message attached, Apple’s MobileMe email filtering has all the superficial appearance of censorship.
In other words? Send an email Apple doesn’t like and MobileMe’s web client might just filter you… and not bother to tell you about it for your trouble.
An e-mail sent to Apple’s press relations from TPM wasn’t immediately responded to.
Such technical glitches often get tech companies into trouble. A couple of years ago during the 2008 election, some supporters of Dennis Kucinich for president freaked out when Google rejected one of their advertisements.
When asked about the situation, Google said that it had rejected the ad because it was written all in caps, which Google says is the equivalent of screaming impolitely on the internet.
Update: Apple spokesperson Trudy Miller has subsequently contacted TPM and said that “Apple is not blocking e-mail with political content.”
