pornographic email

lbatiste

Here's the situation....Any advice.

One of our managers received a pornographic email yesterday from outside the department. Apparently a spam type of thing. Filters have been placed on his pc, but our computer guru says there are ways to get around the filters. Not much they can do to prevent it. Employer is afraid that we may see more employees receiving such emails. They are concerned that if an employee receives a porn mailing she/he may want to file a harassment complaint. We are hoping to find a filter that will prevent these types of mailings, but expects to see more of this until we can locate a filter. Says the problem is that once a filter is in place the people who send these things out figure another way to send it w/o detection.

I would appreciate some suggestions on how to protect the employer from possible harassment claim, of course, I realize nothing is total protection. Anyway, I thought about suggesting a email to all email users about the possibility of receive such email and to direct them to not open any email from unfamiliar senders. Any thoughts, anyone.

WT

Porn over the internet is a growing issue. Generally employers must deal with employees using work facilities to view porn. Here apparently no employee or manager is sending these offensive messages. Thus the employer has no control over the sender. I believe your idea to warn managers not to open e-mail from unknown senders is a good idea. It would also protect your files from viruses. It must also be said that work on e-mail or internet is not done in a vacuum. Human resources is a job where a healthy dose of cynicism can often be an asset. If somebody gets porn, there is at least a chance that they have been viewing porn. You can leave an electronic trail when browsing a questionable site. Porn sent could result from being on such a site. If any employee should ever indicate a potential for a lawsuit, you should secure their computer and run a record of sites visited in the past. Prepare to be surprised at what you find.

Good luck.

Don D

If this is happening precisely as you describe it, in addition to doing what you have decided already to do, I would look at it just as I would someone driving up and down the road in front of your facility, shouting sexually suggestive and profane comments and your workers listening to it. Would they have recourse against your company? In that case, you would have no control or involvement and could not reasonably be expected to prevent it. All you could do perhaps would be to call the local constabulary and report it. Otherwise, you might brick up all the windows and insulate the building and install loudspeakers which might drown out the offensive remarks, but those things are unreasonable. Unsolicited Internet porn will find a way to penetrate whatever measures you install and there's not any more you can do about it beyond your email message to the staff that they should neither open nor forward it.

MrCreosote

We've had success with attachment filters, which block types of documents sent as attachments. I don't think you will ever be able to screen out objectionable text, but you can intercept pictures by blocking jpeg, gif, and other picture formats. The wav format, for example, seems to exist only to send fart sounds, so we blocked that.
If you're in an environment where people need to send and receive pictures, this won't help.

Whatever

First of all, if the ee doesn't know who sent the e-mail (spam), it should not be opened. Even if it doesn't contain pornography, it may contain a virus. Recently, it was reported that spammers, pornographers, are looking to see if their e-mail is opened. If it is, you are more likely to get more unsolicited e-mail than the person who doesn't open it.