5 Comments

Military blocking commercial email services

October 22, 2005 by in Stupid,Tech with 5 Comments

Security concerns aside, blocking mainstream email services is extreme.

If you have a loved one stationed overseas in the Navy or with the Marines, you can forget about exchanging email with them if they use any of the commercial services such as Hotmail, Yahoo, AOL or Gmail. According to a report in Stars & Stripes, the Navy and Marine Corps have blocked all access to such services from overseas government computers, including those at libraries.

Military Blocking Access to Hotmail, Yahoo, AOL and Gmail for Overseas Troops

I’m going to go ahead and assume a good majority of our troops stationed overseas rely on commercial email services to keep in touch with loved ones. This is a very bad decision if email services – Yahoo, Gmail, AOL, and Hotmail – continue to be blocked by the military. Talk about demoralizing troops. Take away the one thing that may keep soldiers sane. Tsk tsk.

Botter, a WordPress.com user informed me that the AKO (.mil) email accounts – which is an obvious approved email service – is indeed accessible outside of military bases.


  • Dylan

    I can only see one reason why they would do that, to prevent news leaks. I definetly do NOT support their decision, but do see where they are coming from. Did they restrict acess to the sites themselves, or jst not able to acess them in a web browser. They could use Outlook and Thunderbird and stuff. Also, do you mind me linking to this article, I kinda wanna blog my opinions on my blog thing…

  • Derek Punsalan

    Link away! Trackbacks are always welcome. From my understanding access to these mail services is being restricted from browsers. I’m not sure about POP access. I would imagine that the military would block access to POP ports as well.

  • Dylan

    ok, im not goin to post it tonight, dont have acess to flock and i want to use the little cite blocks and things.So you dont have any problem with me posting links to articles on uneasysilence?

  • Derek Punsalan

    Content is free to be linked. That’s what the blogosphere is all about.

    Flock Citation

  • Amanda

    Hmm I don’t know if anyone will actually see this, since it’s been 7 months, but my husband is in Afghanistan right now. It’s true he can’t access his Yahoo e-mail, but he is able to stay in touch with me and his friends by e-mail. The only problem was that I had to inform everyone of his address, but he probably could have done that himself before he left.

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