Matthew's Journal

My work email filters used to bar my access to the University of Essex website.

I'm assuming in both cases that you're talking about running such filters in an organisation-wide fashion across some sort of large corporate, governmental or academic institution, rather than on a personal basis.

On incoming mail, obviously a bad idea. I can't see why you'd want to discard or bounce legitimate email due to profanity: if it contains information you need, then refusing to accept it until it's phrased in a way you like is going to make you look self-destructively petty to your correspondents and make them unwilling to jump through hoops to talk to you. Actual harassment of some sort by specific senders would be a different matter, but that's a problem for case-by-case blocking. Spam is a different matter too, but that's a matter for Bayesian spam filtering which considers profanity alongside many other indicators.

On outgoing mail, I can kind of see the point; if the organisation has a corporate image to consider, one might feel that employees' tendency to unthinkingly swear as part of their normal means of self-expression should be curtailed on work time. So it's not a no-brainer, but I think on balance I still come down on the side of "bad idea". If nothing else, forwarding or reply-quoting mail that came in through the absent inbound profanity filter might be a perfectly sensible reason to want to send profanity. Plus there's all the usual points about overzealousness and false positives. Really, if you can't trust your employees to behave in a manner appropriate to a customer-facing role, you have a problem that extends further than a few four-letter words appearing in your outgoing email, and should address that problem at source.

At my previous company, naive keyword filtering was used on incoming mail. Any mail with certain words was blindly rejected, without any hint to the intended recipient. (I don't think the sender was informed, either, but I'm not sure about that.)

Discussion on our internal bulletin board stirred matters. The IT guy said it was for 'our protection'. So when I asked them what words were being filtered, I was quite surprised when he posted a complete list to the bulletin board.

Work at the company instantly ground to a halt. There was much discussion, as everybody learnt some new words (cue amusing conversations at dinner, "so what does ****ing mean?").

We also discovered why many e-mails to our transport engineering team had gone missing (some of which caused delays, resulting in financial penalties). The reason? Well, remember that a key component of a road is hardcore.

I thin that they're generally a bad idea. Appropriate emails get stopped for no reason and anyone trying to send offensive emails can easily do so by carefully avoiding certain words. If you can't trust your staff not to send emails full of profanities then surely you can't trust them any of the responsibilities of their job.

I put other because of hearing Muuranker's story at the weekend