Apple’s Deleting iCloud Emails That Contain The Phrase 'Barely Legal Teens'

http://www.cultofmac.com/217557/apples-deleting-icloud-emails-that-contain-the-phrase-barely-legal-teens/

by rdl • 13 years ago

464 385 13 years ago

cultofmac.com

arn2• 13 years ago

Isn't this a spam blocking technique?

sp3322• 13 years ago

It should send the messages to your spam folder, then.

arn2• 13 years ago

ya I agree. I don't like that behavior at all (I hate false positives more than I hate spam).

I just remember there being debate/discussion about this before.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/tzink/archive/2011/08/09/why-silentl... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non_delivery_report#Silently_dr...

"As discussed in Section 7.8 and Section 7.9 below, dropping mail without notification of the sender is permitted in practice. However, it is extremely dangerous and violates a long tradition and community expectations that mail is either delivered or returned. If silent message-dropping is misused, it could easily undermine confidence in the reliability of the Internet's mail systems. So silent dropping of messages should be considered only in those cases where there is very high confidence that the messages are seriously fraudulent or otherwise inappropriate."

qeorge2• 13 years ago

It could be server side spam filtering (not all spam messages make it to your spam folder with any provider - the worst offenders are often just thrown out).

Just saying it is possible that this is an over-aggressive spam filter vs. Apple taking such an invasive measure. Although, Apple has done similar crazy things before, so who knows.

lenazegher• 13 years ago

Is there a spam folder for outgoing mail?

blowski• 13 years ago

The OP mentions that it doesn't go to spam, it's deleted entirely and unretreivably. It should also be possible to turn it off.

kmfrk• 13 years ago

Isn't this Mobile Me all over again?

ianstallings• 13 years ago

Solution: Don't use iCloud.

nsmartt5• 13 years ago

This is wrong. It goes beyond this. There are various clear examples of Apple exercising far too much authority.

It's not a question of whether you should use certain products. It becomes a question of whether you should trust Apple at all.

rayiner5• 13 years ago

You shouldn't trust any company. Not Apple, not Microsoft, and not Google. Which is why "the cloud" is a stupid idea.

cryptoz8• 13 years ago

Solution: Don't email anyone who might be using iCloud. Wait, that doesn't work.

shurcooL2• 13 years ago

Problem: Problem.

Solution: Avoid problem.

rm9992• 13 years ago

Everything about icloud - from the terrible design to the clunky interface - is as Steve Jobs liked to say, "shit". I have icloud and I'm not even sure what it's for; is it a backup service, an e-mail provider, or a way to find my phone? None of these have much in common, so the fact that they're all bundled together really confuses me. And its name is a bit of a misnomer, you can't even do standard cloud stuff like share photos (like you could with mobileme).

I don't mean to stray off-topic, but this article just confirms my intuition to avoid anything with icloud in the name.

k-mcgrady• 13 years ago

iCloud is a collection of services which includes all of things you mentioned. The web interface is horrible but it works pretty well for me syncing between the desktop and mobile apps.

>> "you can't even do standard cloud stuff like share photos"

You can, shared photo streams which came with iOS 6 I think. You can also create shared photo journals in iPhoto (on iOS) which I presume work through iCloud.

rm9992• 13 years ago

>You can, shared photo streams which came with iOS 6 I think. You can also create shared photo journals in iPhoto (on iOS) which I presume work through iCloud.

Thanks for letting me know. I tried to do a mobileme style photo album about six months ago and was amazed that they had removed such a useful feature. Glad to hear it's back, even if it's in a slightly different form.

vvhn• 13 years ago

> I have icloud and I'm not even sure what it's for

It's a syncing service first (and you can optionally opt in to get an email-id). The website provides you webapps for your synced iCloud contacts, calendars, notes, reminders and iWork documents and for "Find your iDevice". For other applications it serves as cloud "storage" but there's no web interface for those.

The app icons are equivalent to iOS app grid and the little cloud button serves as the home button for the "Apps"

roc3• 13 years ago

iCloud is first and foremost just a bit of service glue to make the native email/calendar/etc apps 'work' without sending people to Google or assuming they have a work Exchange account. In that capacity, it's as good as it needs to be. [1]

Similarly the file sharing is just to set a third-party baseline so that file/save sync'ing between Apps on the mobile devices 'works' without sending people off to Dropbox. And in that capacity it also works just fine.

Sure, it resists power-user use. But that's just because, in true Apple fashion, it's not built for it and doesn't care too much about it. But that only makes it 'shit' inasmuch as about 90% of Apple's services are 'shit' and places it distinctly outside the way Jobs defined 'shit'.

[1] Though filtering this crude is cause to reassess that.

mikeash11• 13 years ago

"True Apple fashion" has only recently been about resisting power users. Before about five years ago, they were all about enabling power users while still being friendly to regular people. This was much more compelling than their current direction. Remember, this is the company that built their OS on top of UNIX and shipped a terminal app with it standard. It all changed around when the iPhone came out, though.

guelo• 13 years ago

My girlfriend's iPhone has been complaining about iCloud storage being full with some cryptic lockscreen message and she has no idea what it's complaining about or how to fix it. The "just works" narrative is a lie.

lorenzfx2• 13 years ago

Are the people at Apple actually using their own services? I cannot really imagine them using these dumbed down interfaces...

shawn-butler• 13 years ago

iCloud is also way to communicate bits of data between apps running on different devices for same user. Which works well as available/reliable key-value store without rolling your own.

Read book on iPad at page 20. Open book on macbook or iPhone and book left open at page 5 when last exit turns to 20.

jonknee6• 13 years ago

Cloud is a hip word. Amazon's got a cloud. Google's got a cloud. Apple couldn't be left with just an iTools/.Mac/MobileMe now could they?

I think Apple's inability to run web services is going to really come to pass in the near future. Everything is moving towards that way and Apple is still left in the "just sync with iTunes" world.

taligent8• 13 years ago

Apple does actually know how to run web services.

They run the world's largest media store and one of the world's busiest online stores in addition to iCloud. Just because MobileMe was a piece of junk doesn't mean they are completely clueless.

NicoJuicy2• 13 years ago

Apple's cloud is based on Amazon and Azure... Apple doesn't have an "own" cloud.

CamperBob22• 13 years ago

I have icloud and I'm not even sure what it's for

As far as I can tell, you pay $99 or whatever, and it periodically sends a text to your iPhone telling you it hasn't actually backed up anything in XX weeks.

Kind of a weird business model but then they didn't ask me.

chris24• 13 years ago

iCloud's free* now, actually. It became a free service when they transitioned away from the MobileMe branding.

* You need a Mac or iOS device to join, though. And you can pay for additional storage if you want ($20, $40, or $100 per year), but that's not necessary.

meaty• 13 years ago

On this topic, Microsoft actually provide an awesome platform in the form of windows live. It does everything and actually works

bpatrianakos4• 13 years ago

I'm with you. I have a total love-hate relationship with it. I love how it keeps me in sync across all my iStuff (4 total) but when something goes wrong, even as a developer, I have no clue what it's trying to tell me. And when it comes to email I've really seen absolutely no use for it beyond keeping my Google, Exchange, and other calendars/email accounts in sync. And no, I don't want to save anything to iCloud, I'd prefer it on my hard drive until iCloud gives me the same level of convenience in managing my files as Dropbox thank you very much.

kybernetyk• 13 years ago

Back then I had a paid me.com account - just for syncing the OS X keychain and preferences between my Macs.

Ironically with iCloud they removed that one feature that made the whole service worthwhile for me.

eykanal• 13 years ago

In reading this, all I can think of is "buttbuttination" and the broader Scunthorpe problem [1] (to use Wikipedia's term). Strange that Apple is using such a crude filtration technique.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem

endgame• 13 years ago

I have also seen it called the clbuttic mistake:

http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/The-Clbuttic-Mistake-.aspx

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/2667...

vacri3• 13 years ago

I remember reading a judicial response that had consbreastutional implications.

scholia7• 13 years ago

Thanks for the links. Very funny piece...

digitalengineer2• 13 years ago

Scanning and auto-deleting your email, combined with the Gatekeeper technology wich houses the possibility of Apple telling me what Apps I can or can not run makes me seriously start to wonder the direction Apple is headed...

Edit: Gatekeeper is OSX technology. It allows users to only install Apple certified Apps on your mac, not your phone. It's fairly new and possible to turn it off (for now at least).

mhurron2• 13 years ago

Apple has always been against Porn on their devices. It's no surprise they're against it on their services as well.

Of course this could be a really poorly working spam filter, but I'm inclined to believe this isn't the case.

eridius4• 13 years ago

Why are you inclined to believe this isn't the case? What possible reason would there be for Apple to care one whit about the email that goes to iCloud accounts? The only thing that makes any sense at all is virus/spam filtering.

TallGuyShort5• 13 years ago

Apparently they're also against criticism of their products, but not against forging network traffic, which is why you get fake 404's if you try to visit "The Best Page in the Universe" from an Apple Store. Interesting sense of morality they have...

matthuggins• 13 years ago

I wouldn't call it a "spam filter" since it doesn't get placed into your spam folder.

ams61102• 13 years ago

Apple has always been against Porn on their devices.

Heh. Wonder how much of it is produced with iMovie, or FinalCut.

snowwrestler2• 13 years ago

It's easy to temporarily disable Gatekeeper, install what you want, and then turn it back on. In no way does it prevent you from running what you want on your own computer. The point is to put another wall against unintended installs (aka exploits), and corrupted/infected versions of known-good software.

daeken• 13 years ago

> The point is to put another wall against unintended installs (aka exploits)

Unintended installs may be a type of exploit, but they're not synonymous with them, as 'aka' indicates. Gatekeeper does nothing to protect against, say, your browser being compromised remotely, as you can run unsigned code in a signed application. Gatekeeper raises the barrier to entry, but only slightly.

mikeash11• 13 years ago

iOS devices effectively run Gatekeeper full-time with no way to turn it off (aside from jailbreaking). I don't think it's unreasonable to think that the Mac's current Gatekeeper is just a stop along the way toward that.

lloeki4• 13 years ago

> It's easy to temporarily disable Gatekeeper, install what you want, and then turn it back on.

Please don't. Just right click and choose open. You will be able to open it, and whitelist the app in the process.

nsmartt5• 13 years ago

Right, but it does create a barrier to entry if you want laymen to run your software. This is especially annoying if you're a developer who doesn't own an Apple PC.

MBCook2• 13 years ago

Apples an oranges.

As others have pointed out in this thread, gmail silently drops emails that contained zipped EXE files. It doesn't tell you it dropped it, it doesn't tell you it didn't send it, it just vanishes.

This is (sadly) not new behavior. Other email providers drop emails (which is sad), and Apple acting puritanical isn't exactly news.

aes• 13 years ago

I tested this on my @me.com account, and it's exactly how it works. Email containing the words "barely legal teens" is simply dropped.

I find it obscene to an Orwellian extent that Apple actually seems to think that no valid email would ever contain the words "barely legal teens". I wonder what other things Apple thinks are not worth talking about?

I have no trust in Apple's email services any more.

cryptoz8• 13 years ago

Microsoft has been doing this for decades. Ever try to collaborate on a web project using MSN Messenger? Every message you sent that contained 'index.php' was mysteriously dropped. It IS Orwellian, but you should not be surprised. The big communication services all seem to have their own little moral or technical hacks they use to keep your discussion limited and away from certain topics / words.

scott_s2• 13 years ago

That's so surprising I tried to find evidence of it online, but I couldn't. Partly because "index.php" is such a common thing that Google won't use it for a search term, which is ironic. Can you point to anything corroborating that?

signed0• 13 years ago

That makes me want to use Skype (owned by Microsoft) even less now.

derekp73• 13 years ago

It is even worse than that -- it also seems to automatically insert graphical smilies whenever it sees what it thinks is a text smiley. Makes it very hard to cut-n-paste a code fragment. Of course you can turn this off, but only on the receiving side -- if you are sending someone a command or piece of code (that contains parentheses and colons), you have know idea if their end will convert to the graphic smilies, and you end up sounding strange to them.

bdcravens3• 13 years ago

Proprietary IM networks are just that. Email is based on standards, with RFC's defining behavior. Moreover, proprietary IM is based on a some level of membership in that network. Email is open and often involves individuals outside of Apple's iCloud network, users who haven't agreed with Apple to any terms of service or the like.

m_eiman2• 13 years ago

GMail silently drops any emails containing zipped .exe files that I send to my boss. That's despite me being one of his most common correspondents, part of the same GApps domain and whatnot. The problem is the same: spam filtering gone wrong.

magicalist• 13 years ago

wait, you're sending from a google apps domain? From the web interface? It always just refused to send if I've tried to do that in the past, with a message explaining why. If you're sending from a different provider, gmail help claims it will bounce it back, not drop it silently, though I've never actually tried that.

In any case, not allowing specific file types as an attachment feels pretty different here, at the very least because the list of filetypes not allowed are enumerated[1], the refusal is explicit, and it's not due to the subject of the exe you're trying to send.

[1] http://support.google.com/mail/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answe...

CamperBob22• 13 years ago

Agreed, this is incredibly annoying, achieves little or nothing in the way of improved security, and makes GMail a lot less useful than it could be. They've done it for years.

cynwoody2• 13 years ago

Nothing silent about it, in my experience, at least. I was trying to send a self-extracting encrypted archive (full of documents) to my tax guy. Google wouldn't accept the .exe attachment until I added .remove to the end of the name.

The intent is to require the receiver to take some affirmative action (e.g. deleting the .remove) before blindly running the attachment and getting pwned. Seems perfectly reasonable.

Unlike what Apple just got caught doing. I'm ripe for a new phone. I don't think it's going to be an iPhone ...

code_chimp• 13 years ago

Ironic this is the same company that produced this ad: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OwT6mgXsZvU

bitcartel4• 13 years ago

In other news today:

"Kim Dotcom... plans to launch an end-to-end encrypted email service to go with his Mega encrypted file storage offering." http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2013/feb/26/kim-dotcom-...

mukundmr2• 13 years ago

I just tested it on my @me.com account. Used the web interface to send an email to my Yahoo account and the email wasn't dropped. Did Apple fix this or is the problem somewhere else?

bitcartel4• 13 years ago

The number of people aware of this issue is tiny.

At time of writing, neither MacWorld, MacObserver, MacRumors or AppleInsider have covered this story, even though it's been up all day.

You would need Jon Stewart or Saturday Night Live to get on the case before Apple deemed it necessary to respond.

mikestew2• 13 years ago

Great, now I'm tempted to spend way too much time experimenting to find other banned phrases. :-P But sure enough, whether it's buried in a bunch of lorem ipsum or standing alone, that phrase will send your mail to the ether. It never showed in Junk, it just never came across the wire at all. Edit: this behavior goes in both directions, BTW; receive or send.

I'd be willing to write it off as a one-time error on the part of some individual contributor, but what else will get your mail deleted? Since there are no checks in place for "rogue" ICs adding phrases on server-side, what will cause stuff to go missing tomorrow?

runarb• 13 years ago

If you need some dirty words to test with, have a look at Searchdaimons list of adult words phrases: http://www.searchdaimon.com/wiki/Adult_words

petercooper• 13 years ago

Why do they mention "child pornography"? Maybe I'm wrong but isn't "barely legal" meant to mean 18 year old adults and not "nearly legal"? Or is it just a common code phrase child pornographers use I wasn't aware of?

onli7• 13 years ago

It's meant to mean 18 year old adults, or woman around that age (so it could be applied to 17 years old as well). This has nothing to do with child pornograpgy, but it seems to be a trend of our time to use that word when youth pornography is meant (and judge the latter accordingly).

Bootvis• 13 years ago

A 17 year old would not be legal, so I don't see how barely legal applies to 17 year olds because that would be illegal in most jurisdictions.

EDIT: Thanks, I misunderstood.

tomp• 13 years ago

> woman

you mean, "person"?

trentlott• 13 years ago

The child pornography bit just sounds like the journalist speculation.

It sounds to me more like spam cleanup.

scholia7• 13 years ago

In which case, it's been programmed with remarkable incompetence. There's more to spam filtering than deleting messages that are clearly not spam on the basis that they contain a particular sequence of acceptable words.

I can barely imagine the legal consequences of deleting without notice an important email that a distressed mother might have sent to her teen.

unreal37• 13 years ago

That's a good point. Barely legal is still legal, and why is Apple even blocking emails that contain those words?

It might have to do with spam filtering. Trying sending an email that talks about Cialis.

scholia7• 13 years ago

As a man who has the ability to search Google (whooo!), I can add that "Barely Legal" teen movies are published by Hustler, and there appear to be hundreds of them with related names.

Some are sold on Amazon.

Presumably the people who operate in the legal pornography business -- working for Hustler, their distributors (I'm assuming there are several) and US-based retail outlets -- don't use iCloud or it could have an unpleasant impact on their legitimate businesses.

jgroome• 13 years ago

I thought that too, but the article mentions that the messages couldn't be found in the accounts' Spam folders.

bitwize2• 13 years ago

It's also possible that "barely legal teens" tripped a spam filter. I hardly encounter that phrase except in porn site promotion.

monochromatic• 13 years ago

Flagging an email as spam isn't the same as deleting it.

DanBC3• 13 years ago

I agree that the phrase is unlikely to occur apart from the context of porn sites.

But I'd like to be in control of whether emails are being deleted or not. (Or flagged as spam or not.)

Some people prefer to get everything; others don't care if stuff is silently dropped. But it's important that they get to choose.

mich412• 13 years ago

Google "barely legal teen" (NSFW) and you will know what it is.

Distribution of porn requires paperwork, age certificates from models/actors etc. Things get even more dangerous when actors can be reasonably suspected to be underage.

The author speculates that this filter was driven by paranoia and CYA mentality at Apple.

jfb2• 13 years ago

It's a term of the pornographer's art. I had a friend from college who wrote for Larry Flynt's Barely Legal magazine for a while. She went on to bigger but arguably less respectable things (political blogging).

DanBC3• 13 years ago

Yes, "Barely legal" is used by many legal pornographers.

The article suggests some connection between the phrase "barely legal" and images of child sexual abuse.

It's clear that "barely legal" has a well-established meaning of "absolutely legal; documented adults; no chance of being under age". The article failed to establish a connection between the term "barely legal" and images of child sexual abuse.

opminion• 13 years ago

M-x spook

seivan• 13 years ago

This is bad, I actually like iCloud, even the email client, calendar and address book. But I don't want them deleting emails like this... hm.

brunorsini• 13 years ago

Clarke has just sold his afterlife iPhone.

Falling3• 13 years ago

Is anyone else being driven crazy by the cursor style on this page? I think it's hitting on a new ocd...

NicoJuicy2• 13 years ago

Haha, the Dictator Apple is going to mess with your mails... Awesome, you get what you pay for, i guess :P

tolmasky• 13 years ago

Its hard to know what to be more amazed about: the fact that with one boneheaded filter Apple now seems creepier than Google in terms of respecting your privacy (one of the few things they could boast about), or the fact that it still seems to be amateur hour over at iCloud. Think about it for a second: they are literally pushing code into production that amounts to if (contents.indexOf(bad_phrase) != -1) delete_email();. How is the takeaway not anything other than "Of course Siri and Maps are a disaster, they can't even filter email in a more complex fashion than 1993."

leephillips2• 13 years ago

Not amazing. Utterly unsurprising: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4916627

jfoster• 13 years ago

I agree that it's boneheaded, but I'm not convinced this is a privacy issue, assuming the email only gets dropped. Shouldn't something need to reach the eyes of a human in order to be a privacy issue?

alxhill• 13 years ago

Try telling that to all the people who claim gmail ads are invading your privacy. Most notably Microsoft.

exodust• 13 years ago

If the email is deleted, that's an extension of the original issue where your email is scanned in the first place, whether by machine or human.

Then comes deletion, making the issue worse than before. Call it privacy, personal data control issue, doesn't matter.

Apple will likely correct this anyway. Two academics could be chatting over email about the potential social harm of "barely legal teens" categories in mainstream porn. They argue the slogan as a provocative, predatory gesture towards all young women. Often the category strives towards "as young looking as possible while legal" which is poor taste and creepy, yet sits alongside "brunette". They might be emailing about that, in which case Apple is wrong to delete the email.

eunice2• 13 years ago

"creepier than Google"

haha lets not get carried away

ralfd3• 13 years ago

A heuristic is a bit more complex than an indexOf. I just tried it myself: An email just containing the phrase "barely legal teens" is attributed by Apples iCloud IMAP servers in the header a "spamscore" of 3 and is delivered, but marked as likely spam:

> X-Proofpoint-Spam-Details: rule=notspam policy=default score=3 spamscore=3 ipscore=0 suspectscore=2 phishscore=0 bulkscore=1 adultscore=73 classifier=spam adjust=0 reason=mlx scancount=1 engine=6.0.2-1212290000 definitions=main-1302280125

I would argue that this kind of filtering is fine. Maybe it was a glitch in the server, maybe other metrics of the mail pushed the spamscore up. If iClouds Mail servers should silently decline mails for delivery is a whole different argument.

lignuist• 13 years ago

Censorship is always stupid. Censorship based on nothing than words or phrases is simply embarrassing.

nicholassmith2• 13 years ago

I know everyone is rushing to decry Apple and their draconian behaviour ("first they took my unsigned apps, now they want in my email? TO THE PITCHFORKS!") but the likelyhood is someone has fiddled with the spam filtering and they've broken something. If the first thing you jump to is some conspiracy you're ignoring the simple rule of technology that behind every good wild goose chase is a member of staff who's quickly hitting 'roll back changes'.

rcthompson• 13 years ago

No. Normally I'm inclined to assume it was am accident, but If it was just triggering false positives on the spam filter, the email would be showing up in people's spam folders. Instead it is getting dropped without any trace.

UnoriginalGuy• 13 years ago

Spam should never be deleted. Plus when e-mail is sent OUT (not coming in) it is blocked.

No way to defend this. No spam filter should ever work like that, even if set up overly broadly.

nicholassmith2• 13 years ago

Spam should never be deleted, it should be triaged and left to the user to deal with but it's definitely possible someone has screwed up. What I'm saying is it's probably a fuck up, what I'm not doing is defending it.

erode2• 13 years ago

Isn't the point of "barely legal teens" that they are indeed legal? On what grounds can they delete discussions of legal content?

cynwoody2• 13 years ago

On what grounds can they delete discussions of illegal content?

erode2• 13 years ago

That might even be a better point than I made.

squozzer• 13 years ago

Some of us are old enough to remember the Calvin Klein ads with the girl in the "Catholic schoolgirl" uniform with her white panties showing. I had to admit at first glance I thought CK was using someone underage. It provoked a bit of reaction from the demagogues. Since then, the "barely legal" motif has had a bit of radioactivity hanging on it. The popularity of Manga didn't seem to help.

lorenzfx2• 13 years ago

One more reason why you should run your own mail server. I guess if it would take less time more people were doing it (I'm not either at the moment).

DanBC3• 13 years ago

Really, running your own email server is a bad idea for most people.

Even on HN it's only good as a learning exercise or for a small number of people who have the use for it.

The problem isn't with the length of time it takes to set it up. The problem is with making sure you have all the quirks sorted out so your mail can get delivered through other people's set ups.

B-Con• 13 years ago

> After more research, Steven found that under the iCloud terms of service, Apple reserves the right to remove any content at any time that it feels is objectionable, without telling you that they’re going to delete it.

Today it's a bad search filter, but tomorrow... what'll they do tomorrow?

Apple is the epitome of "we'll do what we think is best and you'll like it". For now they usually seem to have admirable (or semi-admirable) goals, even if you don't agree with them on the details. I'm curious how long until they make similar moves that are clearly Evil(TM).

danso• 13 years ago

So, does this filter work for "not legal teens" or "totally illegal teens"? Because if not, that would be highly ironic.

cji• 13 years ago

They also (used to) block you from receiving e-mail with "fuck" in the subject line. I had an amusing conversation with support about this and they said it's part of their spam filter. I just re-tested this and the e-mail eventually came through to my spam folder.

largesse• 13 years ago

This may sound weird to say, but I'm starting to think that most of Apple's problems come from the fact that it is a hardware company rather than a software company. In a very real way, it seems that they don't get software. I think it comes from pervasive product focus.

They are great with products. Less so with the area around the product. Can't have something as nebulous as a cloud without trying to control the product experience.

MBCook2• 13 years ago

Apple gets software. The problem is they have never gotten network software or network services.

It's nice that I can use iCloud to find my iPhone and that it keeps my contacts in sync.

Except that it can't keep notes in sync correctly. Which shouldn't be surprising because notes aren't actually notes, they're stored in an email box. That's why you need an @me.com account to sync them.

Really there is no iCloud. There is an email service, a calendar service, a contacts service, a layer on the email service, a file storage service, a network transparent CoreData sync service (that is supposed to be very problematic), a todo service, a photo sharing service, and probably other things.

If it doesn't involve a network service, Apple can do wonderful things. If it does... well... it might work well enough; most of the time.

cageface• 13 years ago

Not really. Most of their software is bad. Their native iOS apps are inferior. iTunes is junk. HFS is garbage. Their office suite is poor except for maybe Keynote. iLife is marginal. They have a solid foundation in Cocoa but I'm increasingly unimpressed with what they do with it.

I think GP has it exactly right. Their hardware is great but their software is an embarrassment for a company with such resources.

bdcravens3• 13 years ago

This is why I don't trust things like email to Apple. Email is a universal thing: whether I'm on my computer, an iDevice (I've owned several), an Android device (I've owned a few), or something entirely different (who knows what the future holds?) iCloud is great for backing up iOS specific things (many apps rely on it for syncing between your devices, etc) but for those things which merely consume "universal" things like mail and photos, I rely on universal solutions.

nicholasjarnold3• 13 years ago

Ugh! Let's just list a few reasons why we shouldn't be purchasing these things anymore. (Disclosure: Never owned one, but have played around with them a little.)

- Not upgradable - Super overpriced - Dictator-style company that seemingly caters to grandma more than technical folk - Obnoxious smug ethos created by marketing team - Lots of people complaining about OSX going downhill - The OP story and associated reports of mass censorship - Just look at Objective C for 5 minutes

I'm perfectly happy with my beefy Win 7 box paired with a *nix machine that I can shell into when I need to do something that would suck in Powershell. Just don't install Java/Flash/ect and don't open JessicaAlbaBoob.jpg.exe and you will not get a virus.

chrisdevereux2• 13 years ago

> Just look at Objective C for 5 minutes

I'm willing to bet you've looked at it for much less than that.

nicholasjarnold3• 13 years ago

Have I tried to develop anything using it? No.

Have I looked at the source code on numerous occasions, trying to come to terms with it's verbosity and ugliness? Yes.

eunice2• 13 years ago

"Dictator-style company that seemingly caters to grandma more than technical folk" "Obnoxious smug ethos"

teehee

kenferry• 13 years ago

Did anyone try to reproduce this? It doesn't replicate for me.

spython• 13 years ago

A few days ago it was reported that they also delete mails with subject "Аренда", meaning "rent" or "lease" in russian, and the subject of many spam mails.

rjempson• 13 years ago

They are going to call it iNanny

lukejduncan• 13 years ago

First thing this made me think of were the "scroogle" ads Microsoft put up on the 101.

I don't care if someone reads my email to sell me an ad. I do care if someone reads my email to censor it.

mark-r• 13 years ago

Any reason to believe this is deliberate on Apple's part and not just some Bayesian filter trained with real spam?

mich412• 13 years ago

They silently delete such emails, not mark them as spam.

Also, I've never seen real spam advertising porn - mostly it's fake watches, penis enlargement and fake social media or other identity theft scams.

tapatio• 13 years ago

And this is why I switched to an android phone. I can't stand the puritan bullshit.

chrisdevereux2• 13 years ago

Just tried sending this to myself from another account and received the email.

All the other experiments on here were from a few hours ago. Does this still happen for other people? If it does, it'd suggest it's more complicated than a simple filter on emails containing the phrase.

That said, deleting user data without user input at all is completely insane. It's probably a good thing that iCloud sync sucks so much and developers aren't using it.

js2• 13 years ago

Non-swipe http://www.cultofmac.com/217557/apples-deleting-icloud-email...

belorn9• 13 years ago

When you let someone else handle your email, they own your email. There is no postal secrecy law, no rule against reading. They can touch, modify or delete according to their whims. It's their email now.

So I am not that very surprised to hear a news article like this. It makes perfectly sense with the current mentality. It also adds another nail in the coffin about idea that "only a machine is reading my emails. Why should I care about that?".

Hopefully this will encourage some people enough to run their own mail servers. It's far less problematic than most people think it is. Maybe it was hard to install and configure this in 1990s, but this is 2013. You buy a domain name, install a Debian machine, and do:

  aptitude install postfix
  aptitude install postgrey

Afterward one follows any one of the many simple guides to install either a webmail (roundcube most commonly), or go to (http://www.postfix.org/docs.html). If a spam gets through, install blacklisting or spamassassin. Easy 3 step guides exist for both.

It always surprises me that people can use a software library with complicated, half insane API's, but can't follow a single page of simple single steps installation. It's not hard and you get the bonus of actually owning your own emails again. If you are a company, this should not even be a question. If the options are to give away all your emails and customers emails to a third-party and thus lose all ownership to them, or asking a sysadmin/programmer to spend 5-10-30m tops to do an email installation, the answer should be obvious.

plg2• 13 years ago

yes yes yes! I 100% agree. It would be interesting to hear from someone with some legal knowledge. I suspect in many countries it's the case that if you host your email with a third pary (iCloud, gmail, FB, etc) you give up some rights to privacy ... whereas if you host your email on your own server that you physically control, for example in your personal home, your rights to privacy are greater.

Even on Ubuntu Server it's very very easy to setup a mail server. Linode has guides, and there are others on the interwebs as well.

Just make sure to implement a regular backup regime.

In my experience IMAP to my own mail server is WAY faster than dealing with Gmail (even web interface).

pyre7• 13 years ago

Note that if you host on a shared machine or a VM, then law enforcement is still likely to see it as your host's box with your data on it, rather than your box with your data on it.

The most conservative approach would be a co-located machine that you own (i.e. your physical property, so they probably need a warrant) or on a machine in your home.

secure• 13 years ago

In my experience, it is not so much the installation itself, but the regular maintenance and the many subtle errors that can occur, which make running your own email server NOT as trivial as you make it sound :).

As for a few examples:

1. Mailservers around the world have different degrees of strictness in what they accept. Some require the sender’s mailserver to have a valid and matching PTR and A/AAAA (!) DNS records. Others don’t care. Some check black lists, some don’t. Some even resolve the MX record of your sender domain, connect to it and try to start delivery of an email to ensure your address is valid.

2. By default, postfix doesn’t warn you about undeliverable messages for quite some time (a week is the default, I think). So if there is any error in your config (e.g. I changed my DNS resolver config, then didn’t restart postfix), your mails will be stuck without any notice, for a number of days.

3. If there are SSL certificates invoked, they should be valid. Some mail servers will not use TLS at all, some will fall back to plain text, others will cancel delivery if your certificate is invalid.

These are just a few examples I have encountered recently, but every time they happen I am incredibly frustrated that emails either did not reach me (usually I detect that quickly) or are not delivered (detected only after a few days).

haroldp4• 13 years ago

I agree with both of you. Mail is hard, not easy. We should host our own email anyway, because the alternatives suck.

I wonder if there is a "Mail Admin Best Practices" doc floating around the web yet?

Volpe• 13 years ago

So this implies there is a market for a simple mailserver that just mimics gmail (or whatever) on your own server:

e.g.

apt-get install gmail-server

fusiongyro2• 13 years ago

I haven't messed with the defaults on undeliverable messages, but my recollection is that Postfix sends you a "hey, it didn't go through, but I'm going to keep trying" email at 4 hours, and you get the final "I gave up" email about a week later.

belorn9• 13 years ago

Subtle errors are a problem, as anyone who is a programmer or sysadmin will tell. It's a constant issue when programming in C or Javascript, and it's almost a job description for a sysadmin. Mail installations could clearly be improved here with testsuites that test the installation and not just the mail server code.

But to address some of those concerns.

While errors in the config can cause big problems, it's not very common for people to change it once it's installed. It's like doing changes to the kernel, Apache, or Xorg settings. Sure, things can easily be broken there but for the common case, the defaults are good once one has passed the installation wizard/guide.

In case of SSL issues between mail servers, I am rather sure that postfix only does a best-effort. Thus if your certification expires, they will fall back to plain text. However most CA's will warn you several times once it gets close to the one year mark, so it's not a very big workload to handle. If you know of an email server that will cancel delivery, please let me know as I would be very interested to hear it.

PTR is a real issue, but if you have static IP, PTR records should be rather easy to get. It is also a one time cost for the domain name. For a company network, a static IP and support is commonly included in the price. You email/call them, and they add a PTR. For private users, a VPN solution might be needed in some cases, but I'm unsure if it's that much of an requirement. Gmail seems fine in sending emails to locations without PTR, or receiving emails from servers without one. However I have not tested this fully or with other services like to Apple or Microsoft.

ux-app2• 13 years ago

Have to agree with this. I ran my own mail server for a few years and even though set up was easy, deliverability was a PITA (I was never able to successfully deliver to hotmail addresses even after doing everything possible on my end).

Then there's spam.. what a headache. Suddenly one day I realised that I have better things to do with my time and now everything goes through google servers.

samspot• 13 years ago

Don't forget maintenance of the hardware itself, backups, and everything else that comes with running a server (assuming you didn't buy one in the cloud).

vacri3• 13 years ago

Plus you need offsite backups, for both content and config... it's an escalating problem.

cheeseprocedure• 13 years ago

I only have a few small-ish mail servers under my care, and I couldn't agree more.

Reviewing the history of the mailop list [1] shows how frustrating it can be when a behemoth (AOL, MS, etc.) stops accepting your mail. It's bad enough when you're a sizeable mail operation; as a tiny standalone mailserver, you are not at all a priority, and it's possible you'll lose the ability to communicate with a significant fraction of the Internet's email users (regardless of how complete/correct your configuration) and with little recourse.

[1] http://chilli.nosignal.org/mailman/listinfo/mailop

revelation2• 13 years ago

It's very very problematic. With all the spam, your mail server is not going to be trusted by any major providers. Their weak heuristics have no problem banning your 1 user mailserver, but they have gmail whitelisted to not ever ban them.

rwmj• 13 years ago

In practice this is nonsense. I have run my own email server since 1999 and "trust by major providers" has not been a problem for me.

supercoder• 13 years ago

Agreed, this is the biggest barrier to running your own mailserver.

Even if you think deliverability is good for 95% of mail servers there's always some ISP that won't cater for you. So you're constantly having to be monitoring the logs to ensure your emails are being delivered.

baby• 13 years ago

I actually tried many times to setup a mail server on my debian machine but never could find a good tutorial. I gave up because I lack the time.

edit: I just tried again, for more than a couple of hours. First I had to guess that I had to install MDB2_Driver_mysql. Set up a DNS to match my /var/lib/roundcube and now I'm struggling to understand how I could sign-in since he didn't create any user for me.

belorn9• 13 years ago

Regarding MDB2_Driver_mysql, I point towards (http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=544694). If you want to use mysql and not default sqlite, use debian package roundcube-mysql and it will install the dependencies for you.

As for users, roundcube uses imap and thus do not create new users.

Anyway, GL, and if you want to have some fun, try out PostgreSQL.

luchs• 13 years ago

>When you let someone else handle your email, they own your email. There is no postal secrecy law, no rule against reading. They can touch, modify or delete according to their whims. It's their email now.

In Germany, email is actually protected by the Fernmeldegeheimnis [1], even while the email is saved on the provider's server. The reasoning behind that [2] seems to be that the mail server's storage is part of the communication process, no matter how long the data sits there.

[1] http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fernmeldegeheimnis#E-Mail [2] http://www.bundesverfassungsgericht.de/pressemitteilungen/bv...

veidr3• 13 years ago

You are absolutely right about owning your own email, but it is also worth pointing out that no email provider in their right mind would irrevocably, silently delete emails based upon this insane criterion (where a movie script attachment contained a scene where a character views an ad for legal porn).

But Apple isn't in their right mind. They have never understood the cloud, they still don't, and every single Internet service Apple has ever produced, from eWorld to .Mac to Mobile Me to iCloud has utterly sucked gigantic balls.

Which makes relying on Apple to handle your email a lot crazier than relying on say, Google, Yahoo, Rackspace Mail, Tuffmail, etc.

sdizdar• 13 years ago

Or maybe we need "dropbox for email" YC S13 company.

martinced• 13 years ago

The biggest issue is your domain getting blacklisted for whatever reason. It may look like the name of another spammer's domain name. The server you rent may be colocated on a rack with a spammer's box (or a box owned by spammers) and have weird reverse IP SNAFUs. Your very server may not have the latest 0-day patch and bet 0wned by script kiddies and, bam, again... Blacklisted.

Note that I do NOT know much about email servers and that is precisely the point. I eat iptables rules for breakfast, I can set up a Debian server from scratch and I can certainly configure a mail server. But there's more to it than meets the eye. Been there, done that. And we got burn.

I don't know "why", but all I know is that we had problems!

tl;dr: 30 team person startup and we tried to use our own mail server. Too many problems. We moved to Google Apps for domain and all our problems were fixed...

belorn9• 13 years ago

At conferences, especially security conferences, I tend to ask if anyone ever heard of a Debian base installation being hacked if it has auto-updates or is manually updated once a week. So far, my count is 0 and when asking self-proclaimed hackers, they also tend to agree that Deiban stable installation is very secure. The installation I got from 1999 is still running, and the count of breakins are 0. to add on that, it has no firewalls. I kind of wonder what happened that caused your server to be hacked. Insecure password?

As for using a previous owned spammer domain, I strongly question that logic. Black lists tend to be both conservative and done by copy-pasting. A blocked domain abcd will not block abc or abcde. If the block lits do not see mails from abcd within a month or so, they also tend to remove them to clear up space. This time frame is also way below common domain name expire dates.

Regarding reverse lookup, I assume that 30 team startup bought a company network contract from the ISP. Such deals should include support and static IP, which mean reverse lookup is a single email away from being done. Co-location contract might be different, but I wouldn't know.

padmanabhan01• 13 years ago

//" install a Debian machine, and do: aptitude install postfix aptitude install postgrey install either a webmail (roundcube most commonly), or go to (http://www.postfix.org/docs.html). If a spam gets through, install blacklisting or spamassassin.//

You seriously think this is simple for non IT people?

mikegioia• 13 years ago

It't even that simple for IT people. I've been working with email servers for years and ensuring deliverability was a NIGHTMARE.

belorn9• 13 years ago

No, I don't think this is simple for non IT people. Same goes for my web site code, or my python projects, or my shell scripts. If I gave either of those to an non IT person, they would have no clue what is going on.

This is as expected, as most people require some expertise to do technical work. I would have no idea how to fix the electrical system in a car, but I do expect that the mechanic knows how to figure it out if it one broke. Same, I expect a sysadmin or a programmer has the expertise to follow single steps installation guides.

bithive123• 13 years ago

If you have enough experience or make enough simplifying assumptions, anything is trivially easy. But it doesn't take much imagination or experience to see that bootstrapping your own email isn't trivial. For instance, I defy you to buy a domain name and a hosted debian machine without maintaining an existing email account.

As a developer / sysadmin who used to host his own mail and uses complicated half insane APIs every day, I know that even things that are reliable and easy to set up (such as debian servers) require maintenance and all the work and planning that goes into making something secure, reliable, and performant.

I don't see how anyone with experience could contend with a straight face that running a network service like email is a set-and-forget proposition. I remember having to brush up on my mail stack every time I needed to troubleshoot a problem, and over time it became clear that I had over-prioritized hosting my own email.

Edit: It's a fine hobby project though, as long as you're honest with yourself about what you're undertaking.

jacquesm• 13 years ago

(1) use public email account to buy domain + hosted debian box

(2) set up mail server, create account(s)

(3) reset public email account with domain registrar + hosting facility to newly set-up email addresses

(4) kill public email account

You only need one for a very short while to bootstrap your own email server, you don't need it forever.

joe_the_user• 13 years ago

I agree we should be more serious about email privacy.

But "There is no postal secrecy law, no rule against reading." Seems like something of an exaggeration.

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_Communications_Priva...

jrockway3• 13 years ago

I've written about this before, but I used to run my own mail server and it's no cake walk.

I used to do greylisting with spamd and ended up silently losing quite a lot of email. (Many mail hosts do not re-send from the same IP, meaning messages essentially get stuck forever.) Doing spam checks at DATA time and rejecting obviously bad emails outright seemed much more effective and less dangerous. I never managed to get Spamassassin to do this, but auto-rejecting languages you don't read also cuts down on spam a lot.

(I missed out on a consulting opportunity because the client's host of choice seemed to be a known spammer and my mail server's filtering was too aggressive about trusting blacklists. I chose to silently-reject those types of messages, so nobody got a bounce. Fortunately, someone was nice enough to ask me about it out-of-band so at least I was able to turn off greylisting and blacklisting before losing much more mail.)

I never found an imapd that scaled to having a lot of messages in a folder, so I ran a cron-job to move mail offline after 2 weeks (for mailing lists) and 1 year (for INBOX). Similarly, I never found a good client to use; Gnus had a very cryptic configuration that I could never believe worked, and mutt was not Emacs-y enough. Reading my email mostly consisted of waiting for Gnus and deleting spam. (I never figured out a good way to get Gnus to move messages marked as spam somewhere so that I could run a cron job to automatically train Spamassassin on the known-bad emails.

For search, I used HyperEstraier: http://sourceforge.net/projects/hyperestraier/

You set it up to run the ingestion program as a cron job every 10 minutes, and then you get a CGI that will show you matching emails for your query. Of course, you can't actually click the links and go anywhere unless you set up some sort of web-based email viewer. I never found anything I liked so I lived without webmail. (There are lots of options. All difficult to configure and probably riddled with security holes.)

Once your server is up and running, you need a secondary MX and a backup plan for your email. (I used Dyn.com's secondary MX hosting service. A lot of spam comes in through the secondary MX, so you can't just implicitly trust it. This involves more configuration.)

Finally, spam filtering uses a lot of CPU and RAM, so you have to pay for a rather expensive virtual machine. Linode's $40/month plan seemed mostly adequate.

I don't really like composing email in the web browser, but I've gotten used to it and $5/month for Gmail and $0/month of my time screwing around with spam filters seemed like a good tradeoff.

X-Istence• 13 years ago

I use postfix without greylisting, instead I drop the message if it is going to a non-existent user (drops about 99% of all mail), then drop it if it comes from an invalid domain (there goes another 0.5%) and then a block list (cbl.abuseat.org). The rest is valid email, which gets spam/virus scanned and delivered to my mailbox. Not very CPU intensive at all...

Then it goes through amavisd that does the spamassasin checks, as well as verify DKIM and the like, and then it gets delivered to dovecot.

Now, Dovecot as an IMAP server is fantastic. Along with dovecot-pigeonhole I can sort messages into different folders server side.

Dovecot currently handles one mailbox for me that I archive a mailing list into ... 150k messages and counting, and no issues. Uses Maildir on the backend. Although, I do think at those sizes it comes down to good file system caches, and a good file system that doesn't have a problem caching the entire directory.

It works well for me, so well in fact that I am moving all my stuff from Google Apps for Domains back to in-house. For two reasons, 1. more control, and 2. I have had issues with Google Apps in the past, and even with a paid account the support has been lackluster. I'd like to know more about my email, be able to check logs if need be to see what is going on.

belorn9• 13 years ago

I used to have same reaction regarding greylisting, but changed my mind around 5 years ago. Have yet to see any issue with it, and I assume this is because homebrew email servers are no longer common or even uncommonly in use. I guess it could happen, but I have yet to find this at work for those I host email for, and same goes for all my private emails. It can be that because many commercial email providers uses greylisting, users of homebrew mail servers has either fixed it or gone over to postfix/exim/sendmail by now.

mindcrime3• 13 years ago

Thanks, but no thanks. I just went in the opposite direction a couple of months ago, switching to a paid Google Apps account so they can handle email for us. I couldn't be happier. Our Postfix / Cyrus / Squirrelmail setup worked fine, but then the server got compromised and taken over by spammers, out IP got blacklisted by most everybody, and right in the middle of trying to fix all that, I got sick and wound up in the hospital.

When I got home, I sat down to start trying to fix this mess and had an epiphany "WTF am I doing this? Hosting email servers is not a core competency for us, there is no competitive advantage to be gained here, and Google Apps is fairly cheap."

I switched over the same night and haven't looked back. After fighting with Postfix and Friends on and off multiple times over the past decade, I'm out. I want no part of hosting email, now, or probably ever again. I have much, much, much better uses for my time than fixing broken email servers.

It always surprises me that people can use a software library with complicated, half insane API's, but can't follow a single page of simple single steps installation.

I have yet to find an email setup that can be described as "following a single page of simple single steps installation". And even if I could, I still don't want to, because there just isn't any real point to it. Email delivery is a commodity, not a core competence. Outsource the hell out of that shit, IMO.

niggler• 13 years ago

There are a few things to note here:

1) in some industries (like in finance) the regulatory requirements make it near impossible to use external email services. For example, there needs to be a record of every email sent out of accounts in the company that needs to be presented to regulators when they demand it.

2) People within the same company may slip up and send emails to coworkers that shouldn't be read outside the company. When you run the email servers, no other party reads them. It stays in the family, so to speak. When you use google or whatever service, they get a peek at the emails.

3) AFAICT Gmail is not HIPAA compliant, making it inappropriate for health care businesses.

nonamegiven• 13 years ago

Putting a scalpel in your drawer is a simple one-step operation. Anyone can install a scalpel.

Using it effectively, and knowing the dark corners of scalpeling, is quite another thing. It would be easy to get into deep trouble with a scalpel.

jasonlingx3• 13 years ago

> spend 5-10-30m tops to do an email installation Hahahahahahhahahahahhahahahahhah

namuol• 13 years ago

As an alternative, are there any secure email services on the web we can use instead?

ben0x539• 13 years ago

This is only slightly more reasonable than handing people an axe and sending them into the woods because their landlord won't fix a leaking pipe.

glasshead969• 13 years ago

Just tried to reproduce the issue but I was able to send the email with the said phrase with no issues. They may have fixed the issue. Seems like some aggressive server side spam filtering which went wrong.

plg2• 13 years ago

seems to me this is a perfect example that could be used to promote widespread adoption of email encryption

damoe• 13 years ago

I note that the original InfoWorld article is 3 months old. In the comments here one person has said that they still see the deletion and two say that they don't.

So, does anyone else have test results to report?

mellamoyo• 13 years ago

I'm a bit surprised there's no discussion yet about PGP/GnuPG (GPG). If we all encrypted our mails would this be such a big deal? No. Is client-side encryption difficult? Not really. I think there's a big market for a desktop email app that does PGP/GPG really well and does so with other people.

5partan• 13 years ago

Add an PDF-attachment to your mail and it becomes a big deal.

edouard1234567• 13 years ago

Apple trying to be data-mining company reminds me of apple trying to become a mapping company.

snarfy• 13 years ago

But, they're legal...

mmagin• 13 years ago

This reminds me of how Yahoo! mail screwed up over a decade ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medireview

mukundmr2• 13 years ago

I just tested this with my @me.com account and it didn't delete anything. How many people responding to the post actually tested this?

ishansharma• 13 years ago

This is shit!

eagsalazar2• 13 years ago

Why in god's name would anyone use iCloud Email? Please Apple junkies, snap out of it.

celerity• 13 years ago

This is great news, actually. It's a free "get out of jail" card. Now you know you shouldn't trust Apple with your email.

Using other people's software or services which you don't control should be based on trust, in my opinion. What I mean is that you should build up evidence about different service providers, and choose whether or not they are trustworthy.

This is essentially why I am OK with closed source software. In many aspects of life (from the obvious, like banking, to more abstract, like personal relationships) we have to act based on our degree of confidence in something. The downside is that this thing is obscured (hence the need for trust), the upside is that through obscurity it was made possible (in this case, email providers make money by having a unique, high-quality offering).

epaga• 13 years ago

Perfect situation for applying Hanlon's razor - I see no reason to assume anything other than just a (really stupid) spam rule bug which is deleting messages when it should be filing them as spam.

Never attribute to malice ... you know the rest.

jijji• 13 years ago

That's one way to prevent spam from coming in. Next you'll find them blocking all chinese netblocks.

jopt• 13 years ago

Spam filter. It's disappointing someone seriously believes this is some sort of "objectionable content" censorship. Namely because that's easy enough to test:

"barely legal teens" isn't delivered (edit: now does)

"actually illegal teens" arrives

...along with everything else of the sort (that I've tested).

Surely the phrase was blacklisted by some algorithm after it occurred verbatim in massive amounts of spam.

JagMicker• 13 years ago

"You just got iPlowed"

(Scroogle satire)

da_n• 13 years ago

Tangentially related, but emails are often auto-deleted by 'cloud' email services (Hotmail, Google etc) when the email is sent from a server-side script like PHP mail(), therefore it is not unheard of for emails to be auto-deleted when it is very likely to be spam. I don't know how the iCloud spam filtering works, but I wonder if there is a block filter being run before the check is done to see if the sender is a known contact (to bypass the spam check). 'barely legal teens' seems like a phrase that would almost certainly be flagged as spam. Perhaps this is just a badly implemented spam system at work (which wouldn't surprise me given Apple's reputation for web services)?

Apple’s Deleting iCloud Emails That Contain The Phrase 'Barely Legal Teens'

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