MobileMe webmail balks at political bulk mailings

Just tested, they are being blocked both by the web client and when using SMTP. And not just for bulk mailings. Just send one simple email with the following in the body to another email account and there will be no error, but it will not arrive:

"Their manipulative and combative attempts at controlling the media and their citizens are unethical and illegal."

As an answer to the last remarks in the article: no, Apple should not let the sender know it discarded the message, since that leads to the highly obnoxious problem of "backscatter". IOW, spammers send emails with false origins, then the origin address get the error report, loads of them. Most of the readers here must have had that happen to them. It sure ain't fun.

So, it is entirely correct NOT to send back a report. Kudos to Apple for handling this correctly.

Brownlee Is a douche. He exploits every story onto a giant conspiracy. (lets see if he can get me kicked off from this site for telling the truth)

Spam filter caught it because it was SPAM. I'm betting this started because somebody tried sending that massage to a thousand people. Thus it became properly defined as SPAM on Apple's systems. Thats how these things work, to bad Brownlee's brain doesn't.

"Political bulk mailings"? In other words SPAM.

(a) if someone was so stupid, ignorant or peculiarly motivated to write in a message that Greece, a European Union democratic country is acting as described in the mail, then the mail server did the right thing to reject such fallacy.

(b) it would of course be far better not to have someone thinking that way in the first place and never write such a stupid, ignorant or peculiarly motivated message.

FYI: The line that MobileMe is choking on is "Their manipulative and combative attempts at controlling the media and their citizens are unethical and illegal."

The rest of the message goes through fine, despite naming nations and making accusations.

"First, this is the web client only -- there's no indication that any emails sent via MobileMe's SMTP/IMAP interface are being blocked in this way"
Not true Apple Mail IMAP are also affected as I have personally experienced trying to send the "Arab revolt" email as a test.

It's a way of protecting you. Keeping you from being the target of someone using your account to quickly send emails that could imprison you overseas, and to remind you that if you are overseas and are stupid enough use webmail instead of a safer solution, Apple's going to save your ass from prison.

I sent the message that people are claiming can't be sent. I used the me.com website and sent the message to my gmail account and the message went through fine. I suspect this is a classic let's try and make Apple look bad story.

The problem with Spam filters at the server level, is due to most spam faking the from address, the spam filters are accordingly set not to respond to the sender.

At a guess, I would say Apple will try to address this issue with iCloud, but in the meantime, there is no way for the web client to test a message through a spam filter before attempting to send it. Also some of the blocked messages may not even be being blocked by App's servers, but by the recipients servers, and since they 2 will not bounce a spam message. Most spam systems however usually tell the recipient (if on their own mail services), that a message has been received and filtered, usually to a spam/junk folder, or a web based service that would allow releasing of the message.