Tuesday, June 22, 2004

Yahoo Is Censoring My Mail

Greg over at The Talent Show writes Yahoo Is Censoring My Mail



"Like I mentioned (before), I've got a new email address using Google's new Gmail service. Since the service is only in beta testing right now, the only way to join is to receive an invitation. Since a competing free email service can potentially cut into Yahoo's business, they've set up filters to make it more difficult for Gmail invitations to get to their users (or at least, that's the way it appears). As far as Yahoo is concerned, Gmail invites are spam.



Since the Gmail invitations come from an email address that ends in @gmail.com, I figured I would send a few emails to myself and see if I can nail down what kind of filtering they've got in place. I figured they were just blocking all emails for gmail.com or scanning the subject lines, but it turns out that they're actually searching for the message body itself.



The amusing thing about this is that any email that contains this in the body of the message will get thrown into the 'bulk mail' folder :"


And the funny thing is ... he is right. Greg shows the body of the text that comes with a standard Gmail invite. I pasted that text into some mail on four different mail accounts that I have and sent them to my Yahoo mail account. All came from non-Gmail mail accounts and all had different subject lines. All four got tossed into my Bulk folder.



I then reported all four as not being spam, and resent the mail messages one more time as I had did before. All four got tossed into my Bulk folder once again. And once again, I reported them as not being spam.



It was not until that I added my email addresses to my Yahoo Contacts that I was able to receive this mail in my regular Inbox. But after I deleted those addresses from my Contacts folder, once again, that mail was tossed into the Bulk folder.



It is clear that Yahoo Mail is targeting the text body of the mail to toss Gmail invites into the Bulk folder. Further testing also revealed that the text had to appear in it's entirety. If you placed snippets of the message (say a couple paragraphs or so including links) the mail went through just fine. It is only the full text of a normal Gmail invite that sets off the trigger.

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