Tuesday, February 21, 2006

Yahoo!Mail bans Allah and Dirty Harry handles

Feeling lucky, Abdul? Go ahead, make my fatwa.....

Yahoo! is banning the use of allah in email names - even if the letters are included within another name.

This was uncovered by Reg reader Ed Callahan whose mother Linda C-allah-an was trying to sign up for a Verizon email address. She could not get it to accept her surname.

Enquiries to Verizon revealed that a partnership with Yahoo! was to blame. Yahoo! will not accept any identies which include the letters "allah".

Nor will Yahoo! accept yahoo, osama or binladen. But it will accept god, messiah, jesus, jehova, buddah, satan and both priest and pedophile.

Ed Callahan told us: "On one level this is just silliness. But we have a war on terrorism and it's migrating to be a war on Muslims - this just shows the confusion there is between the two and how pervasive this is."

UPDATE: Yahoo! unbans Allah!

Yahoo! has reversed its decision to stop people registering Yahoo! IDs which include the letters "allah".

The Reg was contacted yesterday by a reader - Ed Callahan - who was having trouble registering his mum - Linda Callahan - for a Verizon email address - provided through a Yahoo! portal.

But Yahoo! got in touch with us this morning to say it is now accepting Yahoo! identities which contain the letters "allah". The Callahans will be overjoyed.

Yahoo! said in a statement: "We continuously evaluate abuse patterns in registration usernames to help prevent spam, fraud and other inappropriate behavior. A small number of people registered for IDs using specific terms with the sole purpose of promoting hate, and then used those IDs to post content that was harmful or threatening to others, thus violating Yahoo!'s Terms of Service.

Sounds all well and good except that's it's complete bu!!shit.

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