Knowing When to Fold 'Em, Reporter-Style

The nation's largest satellite ISP HughesNet is censoring emails that mention the urls of online poker sites.

Or at least, that was the allegation in a poker news column written by poker teacher extraordinaire Mike Caro forwarded to me by one of my editors.

But two weeks later the issue is much greater. Listen up. As part of my business, I just sent an e-mail the London Telegraph. It was an expected correspondence. Guess what happened? My message didn't get through. It couldn't get through. HughesNet (until recently known as Direcway) - the largest satellite based Internet provider in the world stopped it. It was because the text of the message contained the words "doylesroom. com." I couldn't believe it. I tried again. Failed again. And again. A long support call to the company confirmed that they were filtering outgoing mail. The representative mentioned the recent legislation that has passed the House and awaits a vote in the Senate. There was nothing he could do to resolve the problem, except to suggest I write to HughesNet. Well, consider them written.

I'm not talking about spam sent as advertisement or subject lines that might be identified as spam. I'm not talking about e-mail that was misidentified as spam upon arrival and put into the wrong folder. I'm talking about my e-mail and HughesNet stopping it from being sent based on the content of my private communication. These were ideas being sent - and they wouldn't go out. I couldn't communicate freely. I was sending them from the United States and they couldn't reach anyone. They couldn't even be sent to people in countries who seem to suddenly enjoy more freedoms than we do.

So I contacted HughesNet's PR person, who was ignorant of the issue so I emailed her a link to the comment. She promised to get back to me pronto.

I also tried to get a hold of Caro, but never heard back from him, either.

So I managed to get some HughesNet users to try to send me some emails with the doylesroom.com email addresses.

All the messages they sent me got through. Even the one that had nearly every possible permutation of doylesroom and com and http and www.

So, what's the deal?

Was Caro just bluffing as part of the online poker world's campaign against federal legislation that would outlaw online poker for money? Did HughesNet stop the filtering by the time the volunteers sent messages?

I got no clue.

But it did eat up a chunk of time and so I pass the saga along to you, to eat up some of your time as well.

And thanks to all the volunteers who took the time to help a journalist get a (non)story straight.

Photo: Fugue