One-Third Of Companies Monitoring Email

dotpavan writes "While studies have shown that spying on workers tends to make them less productive, that hasn't stopped approximately 1/3 of all U.S. companies from employing email monitoring tools. 43% of those companies employ staff to check outgoing emails. This seems like quite a waste. While there are some times when it makes sense to monitor emails (or it's required by law), most of the time, this seems like a complete waste of money. Not only are you upsetting workers and decreasing productivity, the benefits are pretty hard to spot. The number of "problem" emails tends to be incredibly low. If someone really wants to send out inappropriate emails, they're going to figure out some other way to do so, such as via a free webmail account somewhere. Yet, the companies are buying up expensive tools and hiring staff to watch just in case they catch the one or two problematic emails that go over the corporate network."

Comments

Automatic or manual?

[Will_Malverson]

Does that count companies like mine, that once bounced email back to me because I described a process as "sucking up all the CPU time", only to be told that 'suck' or 'sucking' is not allowed in our email?

Re:Automatic or manual?

[B'Trey]

This is a geek site, right? And if you're on a company system, there's a good chance you're using Outlook. That means you can send HTML email. (And very probably can even if you're not using Outlook.) So take advantage of a few spammer tricks. Insert an HTML tag into the middle of any words you think might be flagged:

cu<B></b>nt

The recipient won't see the tags at all but they'll fool most content filters.

Shouldn't take very long to hack up a macro or VB script to automatically search and replace for a list of common terms.

So who said HTML email was good for nothing?

Mea Culpa

[TFGeditor]

At the magazine I edit, many of the department email address forward to me before they go to the department editors. Part of the reason is that some of the department editors can be, shall we say, less than diplomatic when dealing with incorrigible readers. Part of my job is to ensure that exchanges do not become denigrating or insulting, and to avoid lawsuits.

Re:so what?

[Chess_the_cat]

Wouldn't work in my office. All webmail is banned. They don't want anyone downloading attachments because of the threat of viruses. Any incoming mail sent from outside the network is automatically stripped of its attachments by the corporate firewall.

A single email killed my startup

[soft_guy]

I worked for a company that was developing a software product for a single large customer. This customer is a very large technology company that had various factions in it that were for or against our product.

My boss who was the engineering VP had told everyone repeatedly to be very careful about the kind of emails to send to them.

The email that killed us was a "reply all" to a thread announcing that a build of our product that was available for evaluation. An engineer hit "reply all" and then proceeded to write a highly negative diatribe about the build. The reason why he did that was he was upset that he hadn't had time to put in a fix for some particular hardware configurations. Of course, we had months of development left in the project and his fix would have been in the next build. However, he did not state this very precisely, nor did he consider his audience.

The folks who did not like our product (because they percieved it to be a threat to their political power within the company) used his email to convince the CEO of the customer company to cancel our project.

I was in an "Oh Shit" meeting the next day with our CEO and the rest of senior management. Our CEO stated that he wanted to throw the engineer who sent the email off the roof of our building (which is maybe 25 floors). Ultimately this email lead to the layoff off of 130 out of 150 employees during the middle of the resession (November 2001) and ultimately the company limped along for another year before folding. Fortunately for me, I was positioned exactly right (politically) to be able to stay, but a lot of really good people lost jobs at the worst possible time.

If that email had *not* been sent, we might have hung on long enough to ship the product. If that had happened, it would have meant that the people in the "customer" company would havee been promoted, our company would have made some money and maybe been acquired. I'd probably still be working there.

That said, I have no problem with companies monitoring email.

Another argument for a union...

[dominion]

Whenever unions are brought up on Slashdot, they're usually in the context of low wages or long hours.

But here's another prime example of where some kind of union could prevent this kind of invasion of privacy (and waste of money). But without any kind of organization that can negotiate on the behalf of the employees, most workers just have to take it.

Now before the Libertarians get their briefs in a bunch, no, a corporation has no legal responsibility to respect the freedom of speech of it's employees. Yes, employees are free to find another job. But sometimes those excuses just aren't good enough.

corporate secrets

[Pompatus]

A friend of mine used to work in the IT department of a major casino. Apparently all casinos have a huge database of everyone that plays, what they play, how often, etc.. This database is highly valuable to other casinos. I've heard that rival casinos will pay 10-20k for it.

So someone with access to it is about to sell it. Naturally all the email filters are in place and she was smart enough not to try that. So she figured she would just print it out and walk out with it. She got caught, however, when she called the IT department because the print server crashed. Apparently, sending a 10,000 page document to a print server doesn't quite work as well as one might hope.