Earlier today, we reported that Apple is invisibly filtering certain outgoing messages sent through their MobileMe email service.
Apple has now responded to that story, and while they admit that there is some level of filtering going on with MobileMe’s email service in order to protect users from spam, they are not censoring emails based upon political content.
“We want to make clear that Apple is not blocking MobileMe email due to political content,” Apple spokesperson Trudy Muller said in an official statement. “Occasionally, MobileMe’s automated spam filters may block legitimate user emails by mistake. If a customer feels that a legitimate email of theirs was blocked this way, we encourage them to get in touch and report the issue to MobileMe support.”
Asked if Apple had any intention of instituting error or bounce messages for MobileMe customers whose outgoing emails have been filtered in this manner, Apple said they had no additional comment at this time.
We never believed that Apple was actually censoring political content. The political content of the test email that repeatedly got our MobileMe email censored was coincidental; the real issue was that it looked like spam.
Apple seems to be confirming our belief that if MobileMe is guilty of anything, it’s in being overzealous with anti-spam protection and not alerting the end user when their mail has accidentally triggered Apple’s anti-spam conditions. It seems all this fuss and confusion could be solved with a simple bounce message. Maybe we’ll get this in iCloud?
