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I find that offensive!
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Your HR department warned you about it, your co-workers make jokes about it, but what does it mean to you?.  Well it's no secret that creating a "hostile work environment" can get your company in big trouble.  Once again, it's those pesky employees putting everyone else at risk.  Well luckily, you can do something about offensive content parading around in e-mail.

First, as with everything, you need to be armed with a policy.  Make sure you get a clear list from HR of what is acceptable and not acceptable content to be transmitted through e-mail.  Make sure it's part of your published Acceptable Use Policy (you do have an AUP posted on your Intranet, right?) and included in the new employee packet.

Fortunately, filtering for offensive words and phrases is fairly straight-forward.  Many legacy/2nd generation anti-spam tools actually use content filtering techniques to look for spam, so if you have one of these solutions you may already have the tools you need.  Most modern anti-spam software includes content filtering as a separate feature, so if you're evaluating an anti-spam solution make a note to look at the content filering capabilities.  In addition, most Open Source MTAs also include pattern match filtering, so you can easily build a list of words and phrases that you don't want in e-mail.

It's imporant to remember that filtering should apply at all levels, in all directions.  Filtering at the gateway alone will not protect you from internal employees exchanging dangerously off-color jokes through the internal groupware system.  That is why it's important to filter on the mailstore/groupware system if possible.  You may also be able to push a small set of rules down to end-user clients, or at least have the IT team build a special set of pre-configured filters into the default install image for workstations (they'll almost certainly have a Ghost image that they load on new desktops).




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