I answered yes to both, because "people are stupid"[TM].*
Most sensible people don't profane via work email and won't be affected, however, a few do and they can give their employers grief by doing so.
* My theories on "People Are Stupid" are along these lines. If you get enough people together (either physically, or in some other statistical population) they will collectively behave stupidly. The actual stupidity level will depend on the people and what they may be collectively trying to do.
From what I've observed, it's nothing to do with intelligence. Intelligent people still do stupid things; and not particularly intelligent people manage not to do stupid things.
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.
I have Australian colleagues who formally protested to my employer (UK local govt.) that their human rights were infringed when their mails to me using Australian English were barred (our system was set up, at that point, so that I got an email saying that I had an email from X, which contained profanity, and so had been trashed. There is also a socio-economic / cultural grouping (which isn't quite 'Scunthorpe') where profanity in written communications is taken for granted when discussing such topics as having been firebombed out of your home.
Now, they just get called spam, which is annoying, but not quite so annoying, as they are just there, among the dozens a day that I have to search through to find the six or seven incorrectly identified ones.
I came down on the 'bad idea' side for outgoing because of the quoting problem.
They're stupid because they a) don't work and b) hit a stupid number of false positives. What might be a good idea would be a query-on-outgoing-mail system that flagged up potential problems before sending.
Eudora used to do this - it marked your outgoing mail with a number of chillis, depending on how "hot and spicy" it was. You could then set it so that anything over a certain rating would ask you for confirmation before it was sent.
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.
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?").
Something similar happened at our place when they published a list of unacceptable insults, including a whole load of Americam synonyms for the "n" word.
To be fair, it was mostly down to the lovely [1] ladies at Russell Residential, but the fact that mails from my housemates about our imminent eviction were being bounced was not helping.
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 just want to know why our email filters out pretty much anything with a .gov.* address. We might all think politicians are a bunch of idiots, but some of us have a lot of dealings with the local councils. I couldn't even get them to whitelist Warwickshire County Council addresses en bloc, only on an individual basis.
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atreic at work....
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Most sensible people don't profane via work email and won't be affected, however, a few do and they can give their employers grief by doing so.
* My theories on "People Are Stupid" are along these lines. If you get enough people together (either physically, or in some other statistical population) they will collectively behave stupidly. The actual stupidity level will depend on the people and what they may be collectively trying to do.
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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.
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Now, they just get called spam, which is annoying, but not quite so annoying, as they are just there, among the dozens a day that I have to search through to find the six or seven incorrectly identified ones.
I came down on the 'bad idea' side for outgoing because of the quoting problem.
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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.
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Even IT people are stupid. :-)
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Something similar happened at our place when they published a list of unacceptable insults, including a whole load of Americam synonyms for the "n" word.
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To be fair, it was mostly down to the lovely [1] ladies at Russell Residential, but the fact that mails from my housemates about our imminent eviction were being bounced was not helping.
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