'Barely Legal Teen' Email Silently Blocked From Apple's iCloud Email System: Flagged Messages Secretly Deleted By Service

Emails containing the words 'barely legal teen' are being silently blocked from Apple's iCloud Email system according to a study conducted by Macworld Magazine.

MacworldUK reporters claim they sent out two test emails from a personal Apple iCloud email account.

The first message read "My friend's son is already allowed to drive his high-powered car. It's ridiculous. He's a barely legal teenage driver? What on earth is John thinking."

In the second message, the reporters say they flipped the flagged words so the email read "he's a barely a legal teenage driver?"

Both emails were flagged by Apple's iCloud email system. Emails are reportedly blocked if the offending phrase is included in the email or an attached PDF file, even a zipped PDF.

Additional testing by the MacworldUK reporters found that neither Apple iPhone's computer servant Siri nor iMessages is censoring the words "barely legal teen."

The issue of Apple's iCloud silently deleting phrases deemed likely to be spam was first reported about back in November, when an InfoWorld reader reported his emails were disappearing.

When it was uncovered that his messages had been most likely been being blocked by Apple for years, he was flabbergasted.

"Perhaps that explains why over the years various PDFs of screenplays have disappeared and were never delivered, for me and other screenwriters."

Macworld's Dan Moren and Lex Friedman point out that even if you are unconcerned with sending emails on your Apple iCloud including the phrase "barely legal teen," the secretive deleting of messages---recipients are reportedly never informed of the messages existence and they don't show up in spam folders---is problematic.

"For example, had you emailed someone about the fact that Apple blocks emails with the phrase 'barely legal teens,' that email would itself never arrive," Moren and Friedman wrote in their Thursday article. "And if, as with the person who originally reported the issue to InfoWorld, you were attaching a work of fiction with such a phrase, that too would be blocked."

The authors point out that because Apple hasn't released a list of phrases that are being blacked out of emails in the iCloud system, there is no way to know how long that list is or what other phrases are on it, without further testing.

Additionally, any iCloud users feeling that their email traffic is being unjustly censored for phrases like "barely legal teen" might be remiss to report it.

"Even if you do discover something Apple is filtering, calling up AppleCare and telling them that you didn't receive an email containing "barely legal teens"--or some other potentially crass phrase that you might discover Apple filters for--is not an experience anybody really wants to have," Moren and Friedman wrote.