[TriLUG] Linuxisfor------- [CONTENT WARNING]

[William Ward]

Ben,

Your statements ring true.  Our IT management has been threatened by 
employees who received offensive mail despite our content filtering 
system.  They claim we have a responsibility to provide a workplace 
free of harassment and hostility, but do not acknowledge the technical 
limitations.  We attempt to provide offense-free mail and Web access, 
but we're beat up when we over-filter and under-filter, and maintaining 
the medium is expensive (many man hours spent constantly tuning the 
system and fishing our false-positives) and generally unsuccessful.

In essence, providing e-mail and Web access to end users may cost the 
company more money than the productivity such access provides.

To that end, the e-mail administrators have petitioned management to 
create one of two policies:  Either cut off all Web and E-mail services 
to the outside world except for a limited number of users who 
absolutely must have mail to operate OR draft a contract between the 
user and the company that states we provide no content filtering and 
that any mail or web content found offensive is the responsibility of 
the end user to delete and cope with.

We actually wouldn't mind if we cranked down the gates and made e-mail 
and Web access a very exclusive service to a select few in our company. 
  Our virus problem would diminish, we wouldn't have mail loops (much) 
and so many hours spent focusing on e-mail problems would go away.  
Instead we'd focus on internal services.  There's plenty of work to 
fill in the time we use supporting Mail.

Obviously our users would scream if we suddenly cut off their AIM, 
E-Mail and ESPN.net access, but aren't these the same people looking to 
meat-hook us over every "Hot Teens" e-mail they get after they submit 
their e-mail address to every web site visited?

On the other hand, I'm not a lawyer (and thus I can get up each morning 
with a clear conscience) and I don't know if a signed policy disclaimer 
would protect us.  E-mail filtering costs big bucks, both in licensing, 
system overhead and administrative overhead.  Like virus protection 
software, it is a stupid concept that should never have been required 
in the computing realm, wasting resources with NO service gain.  If we 
could push out a disclaimer to eliminate our liability, drop our 
filtering and push it to the client end (using the junk mail filter 
resources of Outlook, for example,) we could then focus on providing 
faster, more reliable service rather than acting like cleaning crews.

?  What do your companies do about e-mail liability?  Do you provide 
service to each user or limit your liability by limiting your exposure?

Bill


On Saturday, August 31, 2002, at 10:15 PM, Ben Pitzer wrote:

> On Fri, 2002-08-30 at 10:40, Daniel Monjar wrote:
>> if that's your environment I would question going to a site by that 
>> name at
>> all.  I would also be looking for a new company.
>>
>
> <SNIP>
>
> Daniel, I agree with what you're saying, but the unfortunate fact is
> that companies can get (and have been) sued for this sort of thing, if
> they don't create a policy against it.  The fact of the matter is that
<snip> -w-