Is ISP monitoring and sometimes subsequently blocking of transmitted email content illegal?

[Peter Tomlinson]

The ISP that I use for sending email (and that is provider of my 
landline that also provides a traditional telephone service) definitely 
monitors message body text of transmitted emails because it blocks those 
emails that it claims contain unacceptable material. It seems that they 
use a service that has a black list of URLs that are not permitted in 
body text of emails transmitted by customers of the service - sometimes 
that makes it difficult to report emails containing or linking to 
malware. But they don't appear to monitor content of attached files that 
I send [1].

They don't, however, apply the same monitoring and blocking to incoming 
email, as testified to by the operation of the Internet Security 
software that I use and by my not getting complaints that emails don't 
reach me.

Peter

Peter Tomlinson

[1] So I can report a scam email by bundling its text and source code 
into a Word file.

On 12/04/2014 12:12, Roland Perry wrote:
> Although the ISP I migrated away from this week was definitely 
> monitoring my usage of email in case I was a spammer. The volume of 
> data was unlimited, but I could only send something like 500 emails a 
> day.