Email Censorship and the Daily Digest

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Peter Walker
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Email Censorship and the Daily Digest

Post by Peter Walker »

In the past few days, I was surprised to find I was not receiving the Daily Digest via the YahooGroup. I could see from the logs that it had been sent out (except Sunday, there were no new posts to send), yet they were not showing up in my inbox. I spent the weekend trying to work out what was wrong, looking for some bug in the software, but the logs confirmed the digests had been sent.

Then I remembered I had a dummy account with a different email provider and checked there - the digests had been received on that account:
  • Digest being sent out to Minutus YahooGroup = OK
  • Digest being received from YahooGroup on test account (via rifeforum.com) = OK
  • Digest NOT being received from YahooGroup on test account (via forums.group email) = BAD
  • If I tried to send the digest via forums.group, it was rejected with: Diagnostic-Code: SMTP; 550 5.7.1 Refused by local policy. No SPAM please! = Email Censorship!
Other emails could be sent out as usual, just the digest was being rejected as spam and prevented from being sent out. Considering I had been using this provider since the 1990s and never had such problems before, I was rather surprised. Luckily, the forum was using another provider to send out the emails,  that was working, I was just not receiving them and was unable to send them out normally.

By selectively removing parts of the digest and sending a series of test emails, I soon found what was causing the problem: The link to that vaccination video series was being actively censored by one of Germany's largest email and webhosting providers: Strato.

So now, even emails are being censored for not being politically correct. Luckily, there is no such problem with the other two email providers I used, so I will now be migrating the forums.group domain away from Strato to prevent such problems in future. During the transfer, the forum will go offline for a short period. 

Conclusion: Now that even emails are being censored, it is all the more reason to move discussions to a forum where we have full control and messages within the forum cannot be censored unless we do it ourselves - which we do not plan to.

If one email provider can do this, it is possible that others are doing this as well, without warning or announcement, simply rejecting such messages as spam. I ask everyone who receives the Daily Digest via the YahooGroup to check if you received it on Friday and Saturday. If not, your email provider is also censoring your emails.


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