Yahoo!Mail bans Allah and Dirty Harry handles

Good choice of enemies fellas...

By John Oates • Get more from this author

Posted in Music and Media, 20th February 2006 16:27 GMT

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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 Callahan 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."

The Callahans are still waiting to hear back from Yahoo!

A spokesman for Yahoo! UK said: "This sounds like a glitch. But we will get back to Ed and Lindy Callahan with a full answer as soon as possible." .