MobileMe Filters Emails to Spamcop

TUAW points out to a Mac OS X Hints find alleging that if you try to send an email to someone registered with spamcop.net using your MobileMe account, the message is likely to get lost. Notifications are also out of the question, according to the discovery.

Moreover, the sources note, if a user attempts to send a message to multiple recipients, one of which has a spamcop.net address, no one will be getting the respective e-mail. It is being asserted that the problem is not at all new. In fact, this seems to have been going on since Apple “upgraded” its .Mac users to MobileMe. But why? Well, there's a pretty good explanation to all this. First off, though, let's see what Apple Discussions posters had to say about their unfortunate experience with the MobileMe service.

“I've been having a few problems sending emails directly to a spamcop.net account,” one user wrote. “The emails would never arrive. When I send an email from the web interface of mobileme (me.com), it arrives successfully. If I send an email via Mobileme SMTP server (smtp.me.com) to a spamcop.net address, it does not arrive. However, if I send this to all my other email accounts, it arrives successfully.”

Another Apple Discussions poster jumped in linking to a thread on this very topic over at the Spamcop forums. “Apparently, Apple is filtering and silently dropping all emails sent using mail apps via the SMTP servers at MobileMe. The web interface to MobileMe is safe and not blocked in the same way,” he wrote.

The above-mentioned sources claim there is no reason for too much concern. Although Apple will be prompted to deal with this issue, the best thing those affected can do (until the problem is solved) is to send the message using a different e-mail account.

Upon reporting the news, TUAW investigated the issue finding that a number of users thought it would be wise to forward all their MobileMe mail to a spamcop.net address, so they'd get rid of all the spam. Confronted with such huge loads of “spam” from MobileMe accounts, Spamcop started holding MobileMe responsible, rather than the actual spammers. However, to avoid being blacklisted, it now forbids forwarding to domains like Spamcop. It should be noted that it is not Spamcop or MobileMe (the actual services) behind all this, but their respective network administrators, who are just doing their jobs.