Threeuk is blocking Tutanota

The UK is almost as bad an enemy of the Internet as Australia and the nanny-state filters are beyond obnoxious. Back when I was with “Vodafone Full Fibre broadband” (in reality shitty VDSL because the truth-in-advertising authority gave ISPs license to lie), they had accidentally blocked StackOverflow for 3 days because it was actually the test site for implementation of the filters and they had been turned on by accident.<p>A VPN is essential to defend yourself from the jackbooted UK government. I run my own, based on my <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;GitHub.com&#x2F;fazalmajid&#x2F;edgewalker&#x2F;">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;GitHub.com&#x2F;fazalmajid&#x2F;edgewalker&#x2F;</a><p>As for Three, their 4G is abysmal but they have the best 5G coverage.

Slightly off topic, but I was with Three UK for a while. Reception was universally terrible, and trying to use mobile data was a joke.<p>This was in a small urban centre... called London. Would never, ever touch them again.<p>Back on topic, it seems that they are <i>not</i> using Bluecoat&#x2F;Symantec Site review (which I suspect other providers do), which has the domain categorised correctly:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sitereview.bluecoat.com&#x2F;#&#x2F;lookup-result&#x2F;https%253A%252F%252Ftutanota.com%252F" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sitereview.bluecoat.com&#x2F;#&#x2F;lookup-result&#x2F;https%253A%2...</a>

The support chat transcript is so uncomfortable to read– the person on the other end &#x27;at Three&#x27; (aka a contact centre on the other side of the world, contracted out at the lowest possible cost) might as well be a bot, but the chat reads as if the person at Tutanota genuinely thought that they were chatting to a logical coherent human.<p>Having used Three UK on and off for two decades, this support chat lines up exactly with how I remember– &#x27;robot humans&#x27; that say any ol&#x27; tosh to finish the contact session.<p>Avoid Three.<p>FWIW: all UK consumer telecoms services seem to have horrendous contact experiences (Though Three, of the prominent handful of providers, tops the charts in my opinion), but I&#x27;ve used EE for the last few years, and it has been consistently solid and fast, and thus I thankfully haven&#x27;t &#x2F;needed&#x2F; to contact anybody there. I cannot say the same for Three.

I can access Tutanota on Three UK, even with the filter enabled.<p>When this blew up last Friday[0], Three&#x27;s response was, paraphrased, &quot;you contacted the wrong department, here&#x27;s how to contact the correct department. Their turnaround time is three business days.&quot;<p>Here we are three business days later, and it works for me.<p>This seems a bit overwrought?<p>(Content filters <i>are</i> an issue, but they&#x27;re mandated by the UK government for large ISPs. <i>All</i> major mobile providers in the UK block by default. In an environment like that, false positives are going to happen; I&#x27;m not sure how this could have worked better in practice, so long as ISP-level blocking exists at all.)<p>[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=33981873" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=33981873</a>

The great British firewall, starts here, ends where?<p>As I understand, the lists are maintained per carrier but implemented based on UK regulation. I still find it baffling that despite giving extensive personal information (ID&#x2F;Passport, bill as proof of address, credit score) to get a mobile contract for an adult, this is opt-out with no questions asked (for example &quot;do you wish to enable&#x2F;disable this feature?&quot; when the contract is signed). This leaves a lot of room for abuse, as it&#x27;s demonstrated here.<p>Personal anecdote, I had to phone Three to disable the filter a few years back when I wanted to browse 9GAG on my commute to work...

In my personal experience, I bought a Three SIM card for some testing, and in about a month after not using the SIM for anything besides calling one of my own numbers I started receiving marketing calls. The marketer was upfront about how Three will give out your number to advertisers.<p>The only redeeming quality they have is their US data plan.

Previous discussion:<p>ThreeUK blocks access to encrypted provider Tutanota due to &#x27;age restriction&#x27; - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=33981873" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=33981873</a>

They should reach out to other networks, get a referral deal (20% for three months or whatever) and reply to their users with &quot;your ISP is blocking us, and many more sites, and is horrible in general; here, switch to one of the normal ones&quot;.

Three also have a transparent HTTP proxy, which breaks apt updates, so you have to manually replace http with https in your apt sources.list.

Once again I will say that ThreeUK is the worst UK network.<p>I switched to EE and it’s been a breeze. Giffgaff was also good when I used it.

The same privacy preserving features of Tutanota enjoyed by privacy conscious individuals, make it ideal for fraudsters.<p>We experience a large number of fraudulent ecommerce orders using Tutanota email domains. I&#x27;m not shocked to think that this could be an example of an algorithm gone awry based on the signals it received.

Three is quite a bad network in general. I can barely get any signal in my estate. Ironically, when walking around city centre, I have full bars but rarely ever an actual Internet connection. Their links seem to be universally overloaded.

Interestingly, ThreeIE doesn&#x27;t block them. And I&#x27;m fairly happy with them (&gt;1Gbit&#x2F;s on 5G still blows my mind), except for when I&#x27;m travelling to London and have to roam on 3 UK (I agree it sucks)

Question to UK people based on the responses I’m reading here.<p>If I, a privacy loving person were ever to migrate to the UK is it possible to have a as private and unrestricted anonymous internet as much of the rest of the sane world? Both this and previous thread mentioned some really ridiculous things like lifting restrictions through credit card or drivers license.

Why is nobody giving slack to the horrible UK laws but instead go on how bad ThreeUK is. This is a prime example why traffic filtering breaks the internet and causes unfair advantage.

&quot;Thanks for reporting this to us. Don&#x27;t worry, we&#x27;re always here to help our customers with best possible resolution. I understand your clients are facing issue with accessing this website. All you need to do is just ask them to get in touch with us and we will validate your accounts and help them to get the restrictions lifted.&quot;<p>One would almost be tempted to code a button that sends that email, or even ask permission to every user to send it for them automatically.

I moved away from Three. I recently took out a phone contract, initially with Three. Took me two days to realise that they started charging a daily roaming fee while in another country in Europe - £2 a day. I immediately cancelled the contract and took out a new one with O2. Not ideal either, but at least O2 don&#x27;t have this ridiculous policy.<p>Do not go with Three. I should&#x27;ve ditched them long ago.

Unrelated to 3, but we had an issue where our brand new site was blocked by Vodafone UK. Turned out they had some automatic firewall service that marked our site as suspicious and blocked it. They seemed a bit better than 3 as there was a process for applying for it to be reviewed and removed.<p>I&#x27;m assuming something similar happened to 3 where it was probably automatically picked up and blocked.

If your company and your customers are suffering due to another company’s dubious policy, don’t contact customer service, contact legal@

Just advice your users to switch away from Three - of the three and a half mobile operators in UK (O2 and Vodafone share cell towers) Three is the worst anyway.<p>A VPN may be a solution currently, but recently a Labour Party MP - Sarah Champion proposed the government needs to do something about the VPN providers (obviously the plebs can&#x27;t have too much freedom).

From their website:<p><i>&quot;Regardless of what is causing the issue, this shows why net neutrality is so important for internet users and online services alike.&quot;</i><p>For the UK that ship already sailed given its enshrined in law that ISPs have to block adult sites unless you register with the government.

I realise that Three are shit and this is shitty service. But I cannot bring myself to blame them. They&#x27;re forced by law to push this non-sense because multiple (re-elected) governments have decided that the internet needs to be child safe but are not prepared to actually do it. So they have dumped it on Three (and other ISPs) who are not qualified, resourced or skilled enough to do what is ultimately a pointless and impossible task.<p>The problem here is not that Three are useless. It&#x27;s that they are useless AND required to interfere. Behind that is a very social root cause: we pander to morons who think they should get to decide what other people can read&#x2F;see&#x2F;watch. The solution is that we, as a country, grow up and either supervise our own kids or actually pay someone else to.<p>But no boomer will buy that, they just keep crying until someone promises them a free lunch...

&gt;With its strict data protection laws and the GDPR, Germany has some of the best laws in the world to protect your secure emails.<p>That&#x27;s a lie. German law enforcement can get access any time to the emails - the court orders are trivially to get. Which is a known problem in Germany as for a judge to sign off a search warrant all he needs to do is to sign the dotted line. If he wants to deny the search warrant he has to write up a justification for his denial. Judges being completely swamped in work tend to go the easy route here.<p>Also prosecutors not being independent but having to follow orders from the ministry of the inner (which is a reason why Germany isn&#x27;t allowed to use the EU arrest warrant system btw) make political overreach very possible and plausible in such a case.<p>I wish this &quot;Germany is a safe haven for data&quot; meme would die.

When I am roaming, I notice lots of google results that are HTTP go through a couple of redirects to end up being &quot;age-restricted&quot;.

Article doesn&#x27;t explain how they&#x27;ve blocked Tutanota.. Firewalled the IP address? DNS blackholed? SNI snooping?

Interestingly enough iOS picks up the site as filtered as well, maybe due to some keywords