Cox Communications blocking emails about SOPA?

[ghall]

I'm usually not a paranoid person, but I think I've stumbled across something kind of creepy about a cable provider that operates in my area, and whom I myself use.

So I was sending someone an email to the the website sopastrike.com to a Cox email address, and they told me they never got it. I tried it again, and they never got it. So I sent them a link to a "less radical" website, and they received it just fine. This piqued my curiosity and I began to investigate further.

I use iCloud so I wanted to be sure that Apple wasn't the one blocking the emails, so I sent the same email to my Cox email account (which I have actually never once used until now) and to my gmail account (which I use as a contact for my website). Curiously, my gmail account got the email but my Cox account did not.

I investigated further, I then sent a "less radical" link from my iCloud and the same sopastrike.com link from my gmail, to my Cox account. It received the email from my iCloud but did not get the email from my gmail account.

I wanted to be sure that they weren't just blocking that one website for some reason so I repeated the experiment, but with sopablackout.com instead, and got the same results. Very disturbing.

As I said, I'm not usually paranoid, nor am I much of a conspiracy theorist, but this whole thing smells fishy to me. I would also be interested to see what other ISPs may be doing the same thing. Pretty scary stuff.

Thoughts?

 

[MorphingDragon]

I'm usually not a paranoid person, but I think I've stumbled across something kind of creepy about a cable provider that operates in my area, and whom I myself use.

So I was sending someone an email to the the website sopastrike.com to a Cox email address, and they told me they never got it. I tried it again, and they never got it. So I sent them a link to a "less radical" website, and they received it just fine. This piqued my curiosity and I began to investigate further.

I use iCloud so I wanted to be sure that Apple wasn't the one blocking the emails, so I sent the same email to my Cox email account (which I have actually never once used until now) and to my gmail account (which I use as a contact for my website). Curiously, my gmail account got the email but my Cox account did not.

I investigated further, I then sent a "less radical" link from my iCloud and the same sopastrike.com link from my gmail, to my Cox account. It received the email from my iCloud but did not get the email from my gmail account.

I wanted to be sure that they weren't just blocking that one website for some reason so I repeated the experiment, but with sopablackout.com instead, and got the same results. Very disturbing.

As I said, I'm not usually paranoid, nor am I much of a conspiracy theorist, but this whole thing smells fishy to me. I would also be interested to see what other ISPs may be doing the same thing. Pretty scary stuff.

Thoughts?

Spam filters might be blocking it. SOPA stuff gets caught in my filter... where it belongs.

 

[ghall]

Spam filters might be blocking it. SOPA stuff gets caught in my filter... where it belongs.

The person I was sending to checked their spam folder, as did I. Nothing.

 

[Rodimus Prime]

Chances are they are running it threw Cox spam filters and that web sight is flagged as hi spam and not even put into their customers spam box. They just black listed it completely.

I could not put it past Cox to do it to try to stop the SOPA stuff. Cox has been caught more than once doing very questionable things.

 

[sjinsjca]

All it takes is some pro-SOPA boiler-room logging fake complaints with spam engines to divert and roundfile emails they don't want delivered.

Various political entities discovered this back circa 1998 (I was assisting in a campaign and saw this unfold in real time), and they quickly turned it into an art form. Their people would subscribe for email delivery of opposing pundits' columns and then mash the abuse button when the emails arrived. Voila, soon those pundits couldn't get their columns delivered to recipients whose ISPs used those filters. And filter operations routinely share information between themselves.

It stinks but it's a fact of life today.

 

[ghall]

All it takes is some pro-SOPA boiler-room logging fake complaints with spam engines to divert and roundfile emails they don't want delivered.

Various political entities discovered this back circa 1998 (I was assisting in a campaign and saw this unfold in real time), and they quickly turned it into an art form. Their people would subscribe for email delivery of opposing pundits' columns and then mash the abuse button when the emails arrived. Voila, soon those pundits couldn't get their columns delivered to recipients whose ISPs used those filters. And filter operations routinely share information between themselves.

It stinks but it's a fact of life today.

I actually did not know that. Pretty screwed up. But that stuff would still end up in a spam folder right? I just think its odd that the email just totally disappeared after being sent. Either way, spam filtering should happen at the client level.

 

[MacNut]

There is so much SOPA traffic now that the auto spam filters must have kicked in. It's no different from Viagra spam being auto tagged at the head end.

 

[maflynn]

There is so much SOPA traffic now that the auto spam filters must have kicked in. It's no different from Viagra spam being auto tagged at the head end.

I'd go with that, meaning the ISP is blocking them as they block and don't show viagra emails in precipitants inbox/spam folder

OP, try (or your recipient) using gmail, or hotmail that might work better

 

[KnightWRX]

SOPA stuff gets caught in my filter... where it belongs.

So you're for the very destruction of the Internet as a communication medium between peers and it's complete transformation into another big media channel based medium like TV ?

 

[MorphingDragon]

So you're for the very destruction of the Internet as a communication medium between peers and it's complete transformation into another big media channel based medium like TV ?

I never said that. I'm against spam of any kind. All it does is Jade people.

I'm not a US citizen so its not like I can do anything wildly constructive anyway. All I can do is pre-emptive activism in NZ and not financially support companies that support it.

 

[MorphingDragon]

Why are so few people aware of/pissed off about SOPA? (China-Like Internet Censorship in the US)?

Because Media companies are pushing it, and the Media companies own the Mass Marketing channels. The only way you could get it on air is by making it a political controversy with a major whistle blowing group.

 

[mkrishnan]

There is so much SOPA traffic now that the auto spam filters must have kicked in. It's no different from Viagra spam being auto tagged at the head end.

If this were true, no one would have been able to e-mail about Kim Kardashian for months and months now (which is at it should be, but is not ).

 

[sjinsjca]

I actually did not know that. Pretty screwed up. But that stuff would still end up in a spam folder right? I just think its odd that the email just totally disappeared after being sent.

Depends on which end the blocking is being done. If it's your ISP doing the blocking, chances are it'll end up in a spam folder. But it may be blocked by the sending ISP.

 

[ghall]

Depends on which end the blocking is being done. If it's your ISP doing the blocking, chances are it'll end up in a spam folder. But it may be blocked by the sending ISP.

It definitely was not being blocked on the outgoing side. Part of my experiment was emailing to a gmail address to make sure it wasn't iCloud that was doing the blocking.