[TriLUG] email content filtering

[Ben Pitzer]

On Sun, 2002-09-01 at 09:33, Jon Carnes wrote:
> At my former employer we made it clear to the users that any email
> downloaded to a company system or that in some way touches our internal
> network is *owned* by the company and that the company can do anything
> that it pleases with the downloaded mail.
> 
> Mail is not the personal property of the individual if it is received on
> a corporate computer.  Also, the corporation is not responsible for the
> content of any email that comes from off-site or is sent without prior
> approval of the management.

Exactly.  Most companies have some sort of policy to this effect.  A
former employer of mine in NYC actually started writing up folks for
RECEIVING "offensive" emails on their work PC, even if it was on a
personal account, if they did not respond back to the sender to ask that
they no longer be sent such messages in the future.  Most of us stopped
checking personal email from work, and began replying to folks who sent
us "funny" emails (or anything non-work related, for that matter) on our
work email accounts.  NYC is worse than most places for sexual
harrassment suits, but then again, it's worse than most places for
actual sexual harrassment, as well.

My solution here, working for a major corporation (you all know who, but
I'm not saying online), is probably more complicated than I'd like it to
be.  Since I'm already downloading all of my personal emails to my Linux
box at home via fetchmail, I'm in the process of setting up a personal
IMAP server so that I can view my personal emails on my work laptop
without actually having to download those emails to my laptop.  Thus, if
I get in trouble, I can easily say that my personal emails are not being
stored on company property.  I'm kind of skirting some things, but
hopefully it would be enough.  Not that I feel likely to be facing such
issues, but it never hurts to CYA.

Regards,
Ben Pitzer