Spam e-mails and protecting our employees from it

Rob S

We (like many of you) get a lot of spam e-mails. Many of these are very vulgar. What is our responsibility to protect our employees from this?

We have tried several spam filters, and they catch many of the e-mails, but several still get through. We have several younger women (18 years old) in our company, and I worry what they are thinking, and what the possible repercussions are to our company if they complain about receiving these vulgar e-mails. I know each time we upgrade our spam software, it works better for a while, but the spamers get smart and figure out a way to beat the filters.

Rob

System

You may have seen the tips in last week's HR Hero Line e-mail newsletter:
[url]http://www.hrhero.com/hrheroline/042503.shtml[/url]
Your computer people are probably your best resource.

I think you're right that spammers are getting smarter. At least smart enough to realize that vulgar subject lines will often get blocked, which is a victory for us. But it's still pretty easy to spot most spam and set up your own kill filters. Mine includes words like "digital camera," "refinance," and "jsokolowski" in the subject line.

And I wouldn't worry about young women more than other employees -- anyone could get offended.

James Sokolowski
HRhero.com

Evergreen

My firm has also been plagued by Spam, it cuts severly into real productivity, not to mention the liability it gives you...we recently developed a resonably priced network appliance that manages spam, virus attachments and more. These have been selling like hotcakes to our customers...yes, my firm is a computer/systems integration firm. If you want to know more...reply to me.