Macworld UK: Apple censoring iCloud emails and attachments

otterhead

I’ve been suspecting that they’re auto-deleting a lot more than that lately. Over the past month, I’ve run into many issues with friends and clients repeatedly emailing me at my iCloud account and the mail simply not arriving.

http://twitter.com/incarnedine_v Dan Hibiki

Well they’re probably blocking any e-mail address that might seem like a sex site.

Did their e-mail address have any derivatives of “Hot Male”?
- otterhead
  
  I plead the 5th.
  
  (truthfully… no. Many of the vanished emails were from my bank, for example. Not in my spam folders, not in junk mail. Just… gone.)

http://BrianEaston.net/ Brian Easton

Nanny Jobs Lives!

Joshua Ochs

I think I’ve heard of this before – it’s called a spam filter and false positives.

TheOtherBen

Apparently it’s a strong enough spam filter to search for the term inside of encrypted ZIP’d PDF attachments. This doesn’t seem to be a common vector of spam, in my experience.
- Joshua Ochs
  
  But it is a common vector for malware, and most anti-spam systems also check for malware and viruses.
  
  Meanwhile, Ars followed up and verified that it is indeed a spam filter run amok.
  
  http://arstechnica.com/apple/2013/02/icloud-e-mail-censorship-thanks-to-overzealous-spam-filtering/
  - TheOtherBen
    
    If it is a spam filter issue, then it’s puzzling why iCloud is deleting the emails rather than putting them in a “Spam Filter” folder like typical email services. As Ars puts it:
    
    “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.”
    - James Penrose
      
      ”If it is a spam filter issue, then it’s puzzling why iCloud is deleting the emails”
      
      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)
- fuzzyfuzzyfungus
  
  It’s a totally understandable mistake: Apple thought that ‘jailbait’ was similar to ‘jailbreak’ and took resolute action accordingly…
http://www.disoriented.net/ angusm

Reportedly, it will even censor instances of “barely legal teen” contained in PDF attachments – or even in PDFs that have been zipped. They’re really trying pretty hard to get those false positives.

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.
- http://glitch.tl/ Michael Smith
  
  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.
Karthakon

A spam filter still delivers your messages, it just puts them in a spam folder.
- otterhead
  
  This isn’t a spam folder, it’s just deletion.
- NorhillJohn
  
  Wrong. Even when you have a spam folder, there are plenty of emails that don’t get there either – the spam folder is the stuff that *might* be OK that’s given to you to inspect. There’s a ton of stuff that just gets killed before getting anywhere near your inbox.
http://ok-cleek.com/blogs cleek

but it’s sinister, because Apple’s doing it.
- Hegelian
  
  It’s sinister because it doesn’t go into your Spam folder but, instead, goes directly nowhere, with no bounce to the sender, and because who knows what other legal terms and words may also be getting the same treatment.
  
  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.
  - ivankb
    
    Thanks Hegelian, fanbois keep me smiling though, long may they troll.
  - http://ok-cleek.com/blogs cleek
    
    Then Apples I could email is not for you.
    
    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.
    - ivankb
      
      Absolutely, spam blocking is done that way. But it’s not arbitrarily based on a someone’s list of “bad” phrases.
  - NorhillJohn
    
    Spam filters *never* send bounces to senders. That would be a great way to train spammers on the best way to get past spam filters by providing constant feedback on what’s getting blocked.
    
    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!

bo1n6bo1n6

Well there goes my teen legal advice blog.

big ryan

you beat me to it, good job

India Osaka

I copied the text in the macworld article (“My friend’s son is already allowed to drive his high-powered car. It’s ridiculous. He’s a barely legal teenage driver? What on earth is John thinking.” with ‘ducks’ as the subject) and it left my icloud and glided into my gmail account fine. Sending the same text from another of my gmail accounts (why just have one?) to my icloud account also worked without incident.

These accounts were unfamiliar to each other. I’m not suggesting that this anecdote contradicts entirely Macworld’s article, but its own sample size seems small.

Boundegar

The odd part is that barely legal teens are, by definition, legal.

Roose_Bolton

Just Barely!!!!! ~clutches pearls, swoons~
- Hegelian
  
  And so I counted out the exact amount on the price tag out on the counter. The stores proprietor glanced down at the bills and change then directed an insulted frown at me.
  
  “Is that enough?” I asked.
  
  “Barely.”
  
  01000000 = is binary for two. Barely. :-)
ImmutableMichael

That’s just a technicality!

toyg

So it’s not just their stock price that is on a slippery slope.

haineux

iCloud mail is filtered by a third-party service, I want to say, “BrightMail.” So the blame is not entirely Apple’s, but, I certainly agree it’s a bad thing.

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.

James Penrose

”Have you ever used a service that ONLY re-filed messages?”

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.

agrovista

My guess this was a false positive that has now been removed from what ever the anti-spam product that apple uses (its not bright mail)

http://profiles.google.com/stephen.schenck Stephen Schenck

“it was revealed today?”
Taking a second or two to click the source link in that article reveals the story was first publicized last November: http://www.infoworld.com/t/cringely/hollywood-whodunit-whats-eating-emails-in-icloud-207335

Boundegar

Relatively today! Shut up!
http://www.facebook.com/people/Clyde-Lee-Graham/100000244672312 Clyde Lee Graham

Lay that one at the feet of MacWorld UK… they were the ones to dig up a Cringley article from last November and fail to mention that.

http://www.fieldsovgravity.com/ Garymon

I wonder if it filters out BLT?

haineux

Actually, I have another thing to say: Although bOingbOing is not necessarily “real journalism,” I am dissapointed that they decided to run a trolling headline rather than try to provide some kind of information that might educate someone.

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

ivankb

In general, an assertion like that is just silly. Where to start? It’s not an article? Who’s to say boingboing is required to educate? etc etc

retepslluerb

If providers would place everything spammy into a spam folder, you’d end up with a pretty large spam folder.

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

chris watts

This is BS. I just tested it on my own iCloud account with a message sent from Yahoo. Routed to the spam box, but NOT deleted.

http://flickr.com/mhdbadi Muhammad Badi

It seems that Apple solved that. I emailed my @icloud:disqus account an email from my Gmail account containing the phrase and it got delivered to my iCloud inbox normally. I tried again and it worked. For the record, my only problem is with Foursquare. I was using a Gmail address with my Foursquare account but when I changed it to my iCloud address the verification email was not delivered at all.

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

Charlie B

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”.