Hi. I think i'm this is the right place to ask this question.
I'm not interested in legal aspect, just technical. I know it's not right. But there are still governments which practice censorship.
I'm not asking about spam filters. Those can be applied by mail service providers, which is different from ISP. Say my mail SP is Yahoo Mail, my ISP is Comcast for example. Comcast is not controlling Yahoo severs. But can control traffic from Yahoo server to me. Right?
The situation: ISP blocked a website. Now most likely it will try to filter subscribed distribution mail from this site.
If yes, Can this be avoided?
Apparently I'll see the subject line, but will I'll be able to receive the body of the mail? The text? What if there is no text just attachment, say zip file?
Re: Can ISP block selected e-mails?
now, can an ISP take a message desitned for your IP address, feasibly and ISP could block port 25 to stop you getting sent emails, but this would be a complete block, not a block from a certain person.
if your ISP relays your message (at the actual message level using SMTP) then they could filter the message in the same way a spam filter would/could so they could do whatever they liked from it.
can an ISP stop you looking at your Yahoo messages on their webmail?
filter out the message part leaving only the message headers?
The reason I'm asking I had experience. In Uzbekistan I tried to open some of my messages but I was getting message from the ISP about an error. Those were plain text, but contained censored words like "Andijan" "massacre" "government". I could access the site, could log in and see the list of e-mails, but couldn't open some. While others were perfectly accessible. That was web-based service - yahoo mail.
what I'd suggest.. if you can use HTTPS for yahoo mail then do.
also try using the newer java based yahoo mail webclient that's (I guess) supposed to look more like outlook than the old yahoo mail. it might be harder for them to scan/block information presented from the Java client than the plain text web version.
What if there was no text in the body of the message? just an attached file, say zip or PDF, would it be possible to access it? Can provider block it?
emailed files are encoded in base 64 mime types, they'd have to re-assemble the file and open the file and scan for banned words.
theoretically possible, but requires too much hard work I'd imagine.