I have yet to hear back from Yahoo!’s Mail Abuse team, but I seem to be able to send e-mails including “occupywallst.org” just fine now from my Yahoo! email account. Is Yahoo! censoring the phrase? If they are, they’re not being very consistent about it.

What I find more annoying is the lack of investigation on the part of the people involved in the #occupywallst movement to find out what, exactly, is going on with Yahoo!’s email policy. Tweets declaring “Yahoo is censoring our emails!” are being retweeted blindly by a horde ready and willing to be angry about … something, while no one at all seems interested in tweets that say the exact opposite — “Hey, I’m able to send emails from Yahoo just fine with occupywallst.org in them.”

It’s disconcerting that a group declaring themselves to be for the people, roundly criticizing the mass media for their “blackout” of the event, would use the exact same blackout tactics for any message that does not promote their own fiction of being an oppressed, morally upright group.

I was alerted tonight via a retweet from @GreatDismal to a message from @twiliteminotaur:

RT @twiliteminotaur: Just made a Yahoo Mail, can first-hand confirm they are censoring email with “occupywallst.org” in it.

Curious, I logged in to my Yahoo! email account myself to try to send a variety of e-mails to my own Gmail account. I was able to send a variety of correspondence, everything from a shopping list to a fake ad for penis enlargement tools (to test the veracity of Yahoo’s commitment to censoring questionable content), and I was able to successfully send every single e-mail after verifying my humanity through a simple CAPTCHA. Every e-mail, that is, except for ones containing reference to occupywallst.org.

In the instances of the Occupy Wall St. e-mails, I received the following error message:

Your message was not sent

Suspicious activity has been detected on your account. To protect your account and our users, your message has not been sent.

If this error continues, please contactYahoo! Customer Care for further help.

We apologize for the inconvenience.

Curious about the lack of a CAPTCHA option only for these e-mails, I jumped into a chat session with Yahoo’s live chat support. The following is the full transcript, but to sum up, I was told to fill out a report to Yahoo!’s Mail Abuse team. I’ve filled out the report with the same details I gave Joe the Help Agent, so we’ll see what Yahoo! has to say about it.

Looking around on Twitter, some users claim that they are able to send emails with the occupywallst.org address from their Yahoo! accounts without any issues. It’s interesting that some would be able to send while others are not, and to give the e-mail service the benefit of the doubt it could be identifying certain users as new/likely to be spam robots, but if that is the case then why isn’t it blocking all of my e-mails? Especially the ones I intentionally wrote to myself to look like real spam? I’m interested to see how Yahoo! will respond to my ticket.

Please wait for a Yahoo! agent to respond. You are currently number 2 in the queue. Your estimated wait time is 0 minutes, 12 seconds.

You are now chatting with Joe

Your Issue ID for this chat is [removed]

Melinda: Hi Joe

Joe: Hi! Welcome to our Yahoo! Mail Live Chat service. I’m glad you’ve joined us.

Joe: Thank you for providing us the details of your issue.

Joe: I gathered that you can’t send emails using your Yahoo! Mail account.  Am I right?

Melinda: I can’t send certain emails

Joe: I apologize for the inconvenience this might have caused you.  Rest assured that I will do my best to help you with your concern.

Joe: May I know what is your email address that you are having an issue with?

Melinda: It seems that any emails regarding OccupyWallStreet.org are not being sent

Melinda: I get the following message:

Melinda: Your message was not sent Suspicious activity has been detected on your account. To protect your account and our users, your message has not been sent. If this error continues, please contact Yahoo! Customer Care for further help. We apologize for the inconvenience.

Melinda: However, any other email I send is sent without such a message

Melinda: So I’m curious why I am only getting this message with regards to this specific activist website.

Melinda: My email address is [removed].

Joe: Thanks for providing it.

Joe: Can you please provide the complete error message that you are receiving when trying to send an email?

Melinda: Yes, as I pasted above, it is the following message:

Melinda: Your message was not sent Suspicious activity has been detected on your account. To protect your account and our users, your message has not been sent. If this error continues, please contact Yahoo! Customer Care for further help. We apologize for the inconvenience.

Melinda: This message only appears when I try to send emails concerning occupywallst.org. All other emails go through perfectly.

Joe: Thanks for the added information.

Joe: May I know if it asks you to type scrambled letters and numbers before sending the email?

Melinda: No it does not. Though it does ask me to type them for all other emails.

Melinda: That’s why this seems so strange

Joe: Thanks for clarifying.

Joe: As I have checked on your concern, I have to redirect you to our Yahoo! Abuse Department.  They have the right tools in resolving your issue.  They will investigate on your account and will provide the resolution for this.  Let me provide you the link.

Melinda: Alright thanks

Joe: Please click here – Yahoo! Abuse Form

Melinda: Thank you for your help

Joe: You are welcome

Well, I still can’t get my database of old blog entries to transfer over to this clean install of WordPress. I tried to use Tumblr for awhile instead, but I find myself forgetting about my Tumblr even more than I used to forget about my old WordPress blog. So, I found a nice, clean theme and here we are, editing over the “Hello, World!” post yet again.

I’ve got two writing projects that I have been working on the past few months. The first is a short story that I should have been done with months ago. The second is a novel that, much like my blog, I keep scrapping and starting up again. Each time the idea and plot gets a bit better, though, so maybe someday I’ll have something amazing come out of it.

I also wrote a book review of “Lost in Shangri-La,” by Mitchel Zuckoff for A Blog About History, one of my favorite places to learn something new while slacking off mid-afternoon. It was a delight to contribute to the blog, and a great early summer read. If you are a history buff, World War II enthusiast, or interested in women’s history, I strongly recommend this book!

And now, back to more map-charting of fictitious bogs and plainslands for me. <3