Microsoft = Self-Appointed Mind Police

For those of you with Hotmail accounts, you might be interested to know that Microsoft is filtering and censoring incoming messages and giving you no indication whatsoever that the message ever existed. In response to a query to Hotmail Support as to why messages from this website were disappearing, I got the following reply:

We have identified that messages from your IP are being filtered based on the recommendations of the SmartScreen filter. SmartScreen is the spam filtering technology developed and operated by Microsoft. SmartScreen is built around the technology of machine learning. SmartScreen’s filters are trained to recognize what is spam and what isn’t spam. In short, we filter incoming emails that look like spam.

Evidently their SmartScreen filter is of the same flawless quality as many other Microsoft products.

This IP is not on any official blacklist, nor is the domain name, nor is anything else associated with this site.

This is one of the most blatant forms of undisclosed public censorship I’ve ever encountered.

If you wish to discuss your take on this situation, please feel free to send your views to: [email protected], and you might want to do that from a Yahoo or Gmail account.


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