Falling foul of porn nets

[simpo two]

After trying to send the link www.miserablebastards.com to a client, I got this:

'We had a problem with the email system this week as one of your emails had the word ''pis*ed" in it and was caught by the 'porn' net. Please can you ensure that your joke emails sent here don't contain any similar language to prevent this happening again as it wasted quite a bit of time for the IT Manager.'

I find it hard to believe that a system designed to remove e-mails with naughty words would create more of a problem that it solves for the staff. How can one e-mail with the word 'p*issed' throw a company e-mail system into confusion? What do you guys think?

[Plotloss]

The website administrators at Scunthorpe Council were puzzled for some time over why their users werent getting any mail and why the filter box was constantly falling over.

It was only then they realised...

[FourWheelDrift]

Perhaps their IT Manager had to get up from his desk, leaving his cup of milky tea and chocolate hob nob to walk across the floor to the server to click the "OK" button on a screen popup. :hidesfromITmanagersonhere

[onedsla]

I had a messaged returned when sending a database to a college a few weeks back as one of the entries contained the surname 'Sexton' - I like to think our filtering system is better than this!!

[PetrolTed]

Unfortunately spam filtering is way behind the spammers. Most spammers now use images or HTML to circumvent textual filters.

Which just leaves 'acceptable use' policies at over protective corporations...

[206xsi]

Our spam filter (I work for one of the top 5 software companies in the world) filters out more customer emails than spam.

It then sends an email to us with the 'offending' email attached - and means we need to open all our spam to find the real emails - wasting a lot of time

Meanwhile real spam is pouring in to my mailbox...

[ATG]

Simpo Two ... technical diagnosis of their problem is that they are crap and they know they are.

I'm doing some work for bank at the moment. Bloke opposite was told an e-mail sent to him had been quarantined and a stewards looked like it was on the cards ... he was relieved to discover the e-mail was from his mother and the "inappropriate sexual contents" of the mail were the kisses she had added as a footnote, i.e XXX.

[206xsi]

Someone in my company has just been put on gardening leave while his machine is checked over.

Turns out there was 2Gb of porn on it. However, we are all IT techies here and know that we will be busted if we play with this stuff.

Turns out he had kazaa and other sharing software and the security guru flown over from the US to bust him has actually proved he wasn't in the building when it was downloaded!

[Plotloss]

Two cases of wittedness going on there.

1) The person who did it on a work machine
2) Your web admin for allowing UDP traffic on Kazaa's port allocation...

[simpo two]

ATG said:

Simpo Two ... technical diagnosis of their problem is that they are crap and they know they are.

My thoughts exactly, except I can't tell them that as I can't afford to - er - 'p*ss' anyone off. I'll have to think of a way to express my concern, eg. 'Apologies, however I'm surprised that one e-mail caught in a filter system would take up a lot of someone's time to remove it. I thought these systems were supposed to work automatically?'

I'm sure the directors felt very important and 'with it' when they paid thousands for the software though...

[206xsi]

Tricky one - it's a test machine (we all have at least one) so isn't strictly a work desktop.

However they do still use the proxy server and so could be regulated