Update: Since this was written, Yahoo has admitted the problem, said it was an error, and fixed it.

Here’s something a bit odd. Earlier today we got an email from someone (not sure if he wants his identity revealed here) who claimed that Yahoo Mail blocked him from sending any emails with ‘Occupy Wall Street’ or the occupywallst.org URL in the body of the message. I thought I’d try it out and, guess what, I got the following message:

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

I tested this and played around with it. Every time I put ‘Occupy Wall Street’ or the occupywallst.org URL in the body of a message, I got the same ‘suspicious activity’ warning. I tried using other URL’s to see if it was some kind of anti-spam thing, but they all got through. The only thing that seemed to block emails from getting sent was using this particular combination. Try it yourself and see.

I tried the same thing with Gmail, Hotmail, mail.com and Facebook’s message system. In all those cases, the emails went through just fine. And my Yahoo account is hardly some new, potential spam account. I have had it for longer than I care to remember, and have been happily sending and receiving emails for a very long time with no problems at all.

I sent a query to Yahoo and have heard nothing back so far. I’ll post an update here when / if I do. But it does seem odd that putting ‘Occupy Wall Street’ and occupywallst.org into the body of a message, Yahoo Mail declined to send the ‘suspicious’ message. I’d really like to know why this happened, but I am starting to wonder if I really want to be using Yahoo Mail anymore…