Personally, I was unaware of Apple’s approach until I read about it a few days ago and am pleasantly surprised that Apple just blocks such material from being delivered to me. They could have taken the approach of sending it anyway and then it landing in my junk folder as spam and allowing me the opportunity but this would run the risk of their users, who can be Windows or Mac based to find malware attached.

Not being American either I personally and preferably prefer to view this as part of a good security policy and not censorship per se. Unfortunately, from a monetary position, Apple can’t employ heads for the task of tagging email, nor does the industry at large have the capacity to do so. In hindsight, Apple could allow customers to do one of a few things, allow emails from specific recipients to pass through without filtering and or allow emails in general to arrive in the junk mailbox folder if they would otherwise hit the tag.

Ultimately though I would conclude by simply saying that Apple is hosting the service and it’s free. As the host of a service, it generates a community and within the bounds of that community, it lays down rules that it deems appropriate within the law and within general internet etiquette. Where the law is concerned, Apple has no choice but to position the bounds of the service but within it. Apple as a public company is also bound to position the service to reflect it’s code of conduct or ethical demeanour.

I sincerely appreciate the dialogue. It was interesting to revisit this topic and reflect on what it means to the user. I am sure I could have left something to be desired. Please leave me any further comments, I’ll be happy to digest them…take care

You can test this by creating an email to yourself and from yourself, try it. The email addresses for the to and fro have to be an @me.com, @mac.com or @icloud.com domain. If in the subject field or in the body of the message you include something like, “Barely legal teens” it will take a while to go out and then it appears to go out but will not come back.

You can read Apple’s iCloud terms of service here: http://www.apple.com/legal/icloud/en/terms.html

You will notice that in the section titled;

Your Conduct

You agree that you will NOT use the Service to:

in particular, subsection f appears to explain why such an email can not go out.

f. post, send, transmit or otherwise make available any unsolicited or unauthorized email messages, advertising, promotional materials, junk mail, spam, or chain letters, including, without limitation, bulk commercial advertising and informational announcements;