Yahoo Doesn’t Think I Should Be Mailing Myself Porn Links

As Yahoo continues to fight for relevance, they’ve made some changes to the e-mail system. We haven’t heard from anyone who actually likes these changes, but customers remain loyal. Reader Raven is one of those customers, and is frustrated because the e-mail system wouldn’t deliver a message that he didn’t think was malicious: just a porn link he had e-mailed to himself.

Porn or not, we’ve all done this: there’s something interesting that you want to look at later, so you quickly e-mail it to your main address or an address that you only check at home. In this case, the link was a video on a public video-sharing site, and definitely not something malicious. Or so he thought.

It bounced, though, and the error code he got led to this unhelpful information:

This error message indicates that your email was not accepted because the mail in question may contain characteristics that Yahoo! Mail will not accept for policy reasons. For instance, it is against Yahoo! Mail’s policy to accept messages with malicious content or manipulated header information, such as a falsified origination point, altered sending date, or forged email address.

For his part, Raven grumbles:

Yahoo! is now, after having done some heinous upgrades that make the e-mail website literally no longer even work and completely ignoring the literal thousands of complaints about it on user voice, is now refusing to send porn… even though this is a link I sent to myself.

What’s even worse then that is that I have literally never seen a porn-blocking software that does not also block an insane amount of things that are unrelated to porn.

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