By Mark O’Neill
Contributing Writer, [GAS]

If you would like the country of “Tibet” to be part of your new Hotmail email account name, then you are out of luck.  The New York Times is reporting that anyone who tries to enter “Tibet” into a new email account application is told that they have entered a “word that is not allowed”.

Is Microsoft nervous about upsetting China with “[email protected]”?   Microsoft gave the New York Times a rather strange alternative and frankly unbelievable explanation about banning email addresses that could include partial names of financial institutions.    Got to stop those nasty phishers you know!    After all, allowing Tibet email addresses could lead to someone pretending to be from the TIB Bank!

As one commenter on the NY Times page said, “Good thing ‘Tiberius’ isn’t a popular name these days”