Apple’s iCloud email service deletes all emails that contain the phrase “barely legal teen”

I thought everybody did that.  And also anything containing the strings “v1agr4″ or “c14Lis”.

Yep, I’ve use SpamCop for about a decade.  Maybe 1% false positives or negatives and it’s all right there where I can see it, thy discard nothing.

Their systems “learns” based on spam reporting as it goes and I can white-list stuff and adjust thresholds as I go so the false positives diminishes over time and was never high to start with.

I’ve no interest in a service that kills off stuff addressed to me other than the known bot-nets and spamming sites.  Tag it and bag it and let me deecide beyond that.

Because Apple knows best dear.  You need to trust those who run the Cloud services.  Both Microsoft and Apple are far wiser than you can hope to be so just relax and let them do (to you) what they do best.

If you don’t control it, you can’t trust it.  I’ll bet their TOS is loaded with things you can’t use their service for or types of files and emails you can’t send or store with them.

One I saw for Microsoft, I think, looked like it had been written by Christian missionaries determined to keep their charges safe and innocent (and ignorant)

As for regular emailing, I think iCloud rocks. I switched from Gmail to it.

The big headline isn’t here is “censorship” (linkbait!) but rather “Apple’s spam filters don’t work quite as well as some other email providers’ spam filters.” Burn the witch!

Incidentally, I don’t see Apple’s deep content inspection as a bad thing if it brings us closer to the day that all email gets automatically encrypted at origin.

One company I exchanged emailed data with blocked PGP encrypted data as well. The only way I could get my data through was it encrypt it, ASCII armour it, edit out the PGP headers and footers and separately ask the recipient to reinstate them from an example at their end.

Did you ever check the logs for a spam folder for a medium sized company?

In general, when the comments are smarter than the article, the article sucks.

But, you should probably know that blocking spam before delivery is not new, nor is it exclusive to Apple. Automated spam blocking at the server is common.

(truthfully… no. Many of the vanished emails were from my bank, for example. Not in my spam folders, not in junk mail. Just… gone.)

Why is Apple deleting mails, rather than putting them into a “Spam” folder? Have you ever used a service that ONLY re-filed messages? (Yahoo) The result is that you have a “spam” folder with 70% of your messages in it — at minimum. It’s a nightmare. 

(YES, no matter if you’ve never used the email address on the internet, ever. Spammers generate likely addresses and send zillions of emails. Why not? It’s not like it costs anything to do so. Most of the spam is being sent by infected computers on bot nets.)

If the spam filter is SURE a message is spam, it is a GOOD THING to delete it. However, as is intuitively obvious to even the most casual observer, the penalty for being wrong is pretty high.

I am surprised that Apple/BrightMail did not get bit by this sooner. At least the message in question is, in fact, pretty questionable. If it had contained a design for an Android app, we’d never hear the end of it.

“Is that enough?” I asked.

“Barely.”

01000000 = is binary for two. Barely. :-)

I want to be saved from spam, but I also want to get legit mail. So how spam protection is enacted is important. The devil is in the details. Right now Apple is being a bit devilish.

“the problem is precisely that these e-mails are blinked out of existence the second they’re sent. Customers have no way of knowing what they’re not receiving unless the sender manages to follow up via another medium, or with more e-mails that don’t contain trigger phrases.”