IT Employment·20,078 discussions

Can porn spam be concidered Sexual Harassment to employees?

Locked

We have a relatively new employee (manager) here who has recieved two or three pornagraphic spam e-mails in her inbox.

She has sent an e-mail to upper management stating

“This is now border line harassing! Some employees would consider this
sexual harassment.”

We are doing what we can with our limited resources right now. We don’t host our own e-mail servers, therefore rely mostly on the ISP’s to filter to most obvious spam. To make matters worse we are using Outlook Express for now and rely heavily on e-mail for customer orders — therefore we can’t risk false positives in filtering spam. It’s never been much of a problem before — just a slight nuisance.

Nobody likes to get spam – I especially dislike pornagraphics spam. My qestion is: can the company be held liable for unsolicited e-mails in an employees inbox?

What do you think?

Topic

The answer is yes and no

In reply to Can porn spam be concidered Sexual Harassment to employees?

Porn spam can be seen as a form of sexual harrassment *IF* you aren’t using due diligence. It sounds like you are doing the best you can with the resources available.

If you manager keeps down this road, I would explain that filtering spam is difficult at best and sometimes they will get through.

If you setup a support system where spam can be reported, would that help ease tensions?

but

In reply to The answer is yes and no

the harrassment isn’t by someone in the company. It is by unknown outsiders (or sometimes known outsiders).

If she wanted to sue, she should sue them.
If some sticks unwanted mail in your USPS mail slot it comes from somewhere else. throw it out, hit the delete key.

or use a hosted spam filter like messagelabs or brightmail. they can still use the same mail host to use these usually.

and things like a barracuda spam wall are pretty cheap if they move in house ever. for very small companies, tho outsourcing is way to go.

What is harassment

In reply to The answer is yes and no

There are two kinds of S.H.: Quid Pro Quo (you give me this, I?ll give you that?), or the more common “hostile environment. To claim hostile environment, one has to show that the behavior is severe enough to create an environment that a REASONABLE PERSON would find hostile. Keep working on your spam solutions, and perhaps send he to HR for a review of the EEOC language:

http://www.eeoc.gov/types/sexual_harassment.html

Wrong answer jmgarvin! Porn spam IS Sexual Harassment

In reply to The answer is yes and no

Management is capable of preventing most if not all porn spam. Management is also charged with the responsiblity to provide a harassment-free, “non-poisonous” working environment for staff. Unsolicited e-mail that contains sexual content is poisonous and harassing. Management can be sued for it, and the employee will likely win the case. I consult to an organization where 60% of its unfiltered inbound e-mail is spam. Its management has researched, acquired, and actively manages systems that ensure none of the spam makes it to employee workstations. Believe it or not, it can be done!

Another Wiring Closet Lawyer

In reply to Wrong answer jmgarvin! Porn spam IS Sexual Harassment

Perhaps in Canada Scoid, perhaps in Canada. I seriously doubt spam would legally be considered sexual harassment in a court of law in our United States …but don’t take mine or any others opinions here as gospel. What you need to do is ask your companies legal counsel this question. Just ask upper management, they will point you in the right direction. Also, a hosted spam filter solution would probably be a good idea. They are not overly expensive and most work very well.

Holy Mackerel!

In reply to Another Wiring Closet Lawyer

So you mean if I was a manager of dubious morals and ethics, and I wanted to get rid of, say a highly religious yet incompetent employee in the US, all I’d have to do is get a third party to target that person with lots of porn spam to the point where he or she just couldn’t comfortably work for my firm any longer? What a great way to get rid of someone without the risk of being sued for wrongful dismissal! (Sorry – I get paid to think this way.)

I like your hosted filter solution – that’s what my clients use. They work great after some tweaking.

If the person was incompetent…

In reply to Holy Mackerel!

Nothing so drastic would need to be done to terminate the employee. All of the states that I have worked in have been “at-will” employment, meaning that if either the company or myself wanted to terminate employment, the other party could take no legal action (of course, unless I could prove discrimination, but then, the burden of proof is on me.)
My point is this, simply. Unethical or dubious morals and Unethical managment aside, an incompetent employee would be fairly easy to terminate. YOUR FIRED! why? You were unable to perform your job duties satisfactorily.
A competent employee? Doesn’t matter in “at-will” employment. Why? . The only merit your argument has for this one is avoiding unemployment benefits, but usually companies gather evidence supporting incompetence claims before terminating an employee.

Depends on where you live

In reply to Holy Mackerel!

Yes, you could do that, but why not just fire such a person? I work in an “at will” state; I can walk out the door any time I feel like it and my employer can kick me out the door any time he feels like it. The HR department is considerably smaller in such states.

Reply To: Can porn spam be concidered Sexual Harassment to employees?

In reply to Depends on where you live

I whole-heartedly agree, boot ’em if you can. If the company does an adequate job of trying to “protect” her and she still complains… “there’s the door”

I would not want to be at the board meeting where:

Mgt “Why is the new database project not completed yet?”

IT “We had to re-allocate the budget for an on-site spam filter so Janice wouldn’t get so offended, which took up the money that we’d set aside for that new SQL Server the project needed.”

Just my $0.02

Didn’t mean it to sound so harsh

In reply to Holy Mackerel!

Sorry Scoid, I didn’t intend for my post to come off in such a harsh way and the subject, “another wiring closet lawyer”, was not aimed directly at you. My concern is for the original poster in this thread. Reliance on this board is perfect for some things but I believe in this case he and his superiors should seek professional legal counsel, lest they get caught in an irreversible situation. Might cost a couple of hundred bucks for a $10 answer but its better to be safe than sorry. None of us will be in a position to defend him if the case materializes and makes it past discovery. Sometimes an ounce of prevention… well you get the point. As we are all aware, every jurisdiction of every region of every state of every country is slightly different in how these sorts of cases are handled. On a personal note: wait for the day that she wears a short skirt to work. Run to management complaining that you feel targeted by her exposure and you are finding it very difficult to function in such a provocative environment …kidding *grin*

If they were truly incompetent

In reply to Holy Mackerel!

and you couldn’t get rid of them ethically, you might find yourself accused of being incompetent.

Simple Solution

In reply to Holy Mackerel!

Get rid of private email: Hire some people to screen all email traffic in your company. That’s the only effective filter. And while you’re at it, you can keep tabs on your employees to make sure they’re doing their job correctly.

And let’s face it: There’s a good chance that the spam is the recipient’s fault, since often times it is caused by said recipient posting their email address to a mailing list, getting a trojan, etc.

you know your a cry baby

In reply to Wrong answer jmgarvin! Porn spam IS Sexual Harassment

You would say yes it is, anything would be to you like they say if you don’t want to read it delete it. No one is forcing you to read it if you are then your just as bad. You blame the companys that send it they have to make a living as well as you, but your right, you do have the power sue your company for not doing enought, hey sue everyone, lets have a suing party, everyone is welcome, but no porn or computer. Remember people we open this door, now it’s bugging us, delete it. You have the same deal here delete me.

I Agree with You and George Carlin!

In reply to you know your a cry baby

We have bred a generation of wimps with the legal system jumping in to become the protectors of everyone, no matter how petty the complaint. Notice how we’re no longer encouraged to have personal strength of character and just ‘suck it up’ when faced with some sort of hardship anymore? (Sorry, that was probably a bad choice of words when writing about porn spam.) The legal system has encouraged everyone to play the victim. Even worse, playing the victim is a game with potentially huge cash prizes for the contestants and their lawyers! Remember the woman who spilled hot McDonalds coffee on her lap while sitting in her car, opening the lid to add cream and sugar and ‘won’ $2.9 million through her lawsuit? She wasn’t expecting the coffee to be hot? She was holding a full yet flimsy cup over her lap while opening it and expected all the contents to remain inside the cup? Whatever happened to survival of the fittest?

I argue from the side of the firm: in a society of willing victims, it is the rational requirement for Management to create safe work environments, free of harassment and abuse of employees, sometimes at great cost. Also take into account the nature of those who need to be protected: the same ‘victim’ who will sue her employer for excess exposure to porn spam is the same imbecile that can’t recognize spam just by reading the subject line without opening the message. This person will never just delete an email message without opening it first. You can’t turn yourself into a fragile deer without first walking in front of the headlights, can you?

McDonald’s case.

In reply to I Agree with You and George Carlin!

Not to thread jack, but the McDonald’s burn case isn’t a great example if you’re familiar with facts of the case, rather than the anecdotes reported in the news.

http://www.centerjd.org/free/mythbusters-free/MB_mcdonalds.htm

Back to the case at hand, if she were to file suit, you may be found liable. It depends on if the judge or jury feels as though you took reasonable steps/action to mitigate the harassing emails.

define ‘harassment’

In reply to McDonald’s case.

coolrobc said: “Back to the case at hand, if she were to file suit,
you may be found liable. It depends on if the judge or jury feels
as though you took reasonable steps/action to mitigate the
harassing emails.”
While this is true, the standard is much higher if the source of
the offensive emails is external to the company – outside the
company’s control.

FWIW: if an employee raised such a complaint to me and, based
on TWO messages from an external source, threatened action …
that would go into their personnel folder and would count
heavily against her come review time. Two messages from an
INTERNAL source would certainly warrant remedial action on the
company’s part, as would two DOZEN such external emails …
but TWO EXTERNAL emails? That indicates the person is a
problem waiting to happen, one the company cannot afford to
continue to employ.

Reply To: Can porn spam be concidered Sexual Harassment to employees?

In reply to define ‘harassment’

“FWIW: if an employee raised such a complaint to me and, based on TWO messages from an external source, threatened action … that would go into their personnel folder and would count heavily against her come review time.”

… and then the employee files a discrimination claim based on the fact that you held her prior complaints against her for review.

Look, I agree that it’s extreme, but this is exactly the type of situation that gets a number of companies in trouble.

If all she received were the 2 emails, from an outside source, this would probably never get beyond discovery. However, if she continues to receive the offending emails, and you do nothing about it, your run the risk of creating a “Hostile Work Environment”. Just about anything that makes an employee uncomfortable, can be construed as harrassment, it all depends on how good a lawyer they get.

As long as you can prove that you made a reasonable attempt to stop the offending emails you probably don’t have that much of a concearn. But you should follow up with the employee to be sure that she’s comfortable with what ever the final solution is.

It’s better to be safe than sorry…

Yes … AND No!

In reply to Wrong answer jmgarvin! Porn spam IS Sexual Harassment

Yes … Porn SPAM very much IS “Sexual Harassment”. Those
responsible for it can be sued, or worse. Which doesn’t make the
COMPANY responsible! The new manager needs to show that:
– someone in the company sent it
– the company could reasonably have prevented it
– she had no way to prevent it
For example, a woman getting an email offering access to “XXX”
sites is hardly being “harassed” – unless it was sent by a
coworker. She could not have been offended unless she opened
it, and she obviously should NOT have opened it.

She should get a Mac on her desktop and train its Mail program
to Trash what she considers “offensive” … or take some other
step towards PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY!

A Mac…??

In reply to Yes … AND No!

Hmmm, I never thought of that solution. Everyone should get Macs and all of the worlds spam would cease to exist. As would viruses and crashes and nuclear weapons…and…and…

God I hate Macs

Sorry I got carried away. You can use the inherent spam filter in any contemporary email client to filter out the crap (not just on a d@mn Mac.) problem is the user who has this sort of issue is not the sort of user who is capable of configuring client side filters. Users who would levy such a complaint in the context of sexual harrasment probably don’t have a great deal of technical savvy in the first place. Thing is, my staff and I deal with users like this daily …it’s our job to train, support, and sometime pacify them. Moving right along…

No, I do not believe it.

In reply to Wrong answer jmgarvin! Porn spam IS Sexual Harassment

I can think of only one absolutely sure-fire way to prevent spam from reaching employees- terminate all email services and remove the server. Block all email carrying ports, including 80 and 443, (web, secure web) so that nobody can log onto any web hosted, but external email server.

Spam _is_ email. It is distinguished by one characteristic only: It is unsolicited. Now then, please tell me how your magical system knows whether any incoming message was SOLICITED?

Conversely, you may find some of your employees are “soliciting” porn; whitelisted in other words, and marches right into your enterprise.

Stopping porn and stopping spam are NOT identical goals. I’ve used Brightmail, and it is very good — its strength is essentially zero false positives; vital for a business! It lets through more spam than some other solutions but you’ll never lose a million dollar contract in “quarantine.”

Your solution sounds too aggressive to me; I’ll bet that you have lost critical documents in quarantine — and browsing through quarantine to find them is worse than no spam filtering at all; you are wading through 99 % pure spam looking for a needle in a haystack.

So…

In reply to Wrong answer jmgarvin! Porn spam IS Sexual Harassment

I’ll have to go with this argument (like in a post before)… If you get a piece of mail from…say…Playboy that gives you a free subscription etc… etc.. we can sue the postal service?? … yea right!! gimme a break…

20 years ago, I told people this is where this would be going

In reply to Wrong answer jmgarvin! Porn spam IS Sexual Harassment

Long before most people had ever heard the term ?sexual harassment?, I could tell where this was going. At least back then, most people could at least agree on what it meant in an employment situation: A superior using his/her position of power in order to fulfill their own sense of sexual gratification at the expense of subordinates. The classic example would have been a boss insisting upon sex for an employee to gain advancement or even to keep a job. Few could argue against that.

The problem is that as soon as such cultural issues get codified into law, the politicians, activists, and lawyers all exploit it towards their own selfish ends.

20 years later, look where we have arrived at. So few sexual harassment cases anymore fit under the classical definition. Today, it?s mostly nonsense like we have here, where the emotional cripples get to define what is acceptable for the rest of us, and/or the opportunists seize the slightest nugget as their anchor for the big legal victory payday.

If anything, cases like this only serve as arguments as to why we need a ?loser pays? legal system in this country, where the loser of the case gets to pay the legal fees of the winner. Only then can people be safe from ?legal harassment? and the courts can focus their attention on the real cases of abuse.

Quite the contrary (unfortunately)

In reply to 20 years ago, I told people this is where this would be going

We have all seen the case where the whistle-blower was fired (or worse) because “the company” had much better attorneys. Or the individual who should have won (in polite opinion) employed a law-abiding lawyer and the opposition scraped the bottom of the lice barrel to find lawyers to simply win at any cost.

If the loser has to pay, then the small guy will never bring suit and the big guy knows it. Basically, that is how it was back in the good old feudal days.

Why don’t we bring back the duel? That only required 4 people and the person that was “right” was the one who wasn’t dead! The answer is pretty simple here too: The large company would simply have professional duelers on the payroll instead of the lawyers they already have on retainer.

Nonsense

In reply to Quite the contrary (unfortunately)

You can’t deny the laws of economics.

If the case is good, the small guy can and will win, and lawyers will still fight for the case because there will be money to be made. In fact, companies that are in the wrong will be far more likely to settle, because the cost of loosing will be that much greater.

Sadly, I’m not sure which laws you refer to…

In reply to Nonsense

Which laws of economics do you refer to? “The better product will win over inferior products” or “The better marketing plan will win”?

Don’t get me wrong, I like the idea of the world you live in and I don’t like the one I live in. Where I live, superior products regularly get overrun by inferior ones because the superior ones were made by the little guy and the big guy’s marketing plan overwhelmed him.

But, could you help me understand this concept of “the case is good”? Does this mean that it is an open-and-shut case and it is 100% clear who is at fault? Does it mean that the public is 100% behind what one side believes and against the other? And, are you talking only of criminal court or would this cover civil court as well where the court has to determined the percentage of guilt to assign to the two sides?

I’m not sure how this would affect cases where a small group of “crackpots” think that something is bad for you and the company “educates” the public otherwise. Please explain how your idea would play out in cases like cigarettes and asbestos. What about agent orange, ozone, PVCs, PCBs, thalidamide and a host of other man-made chemicals that, until somebody files a suit in the face of insurmountable odds, nobody acknowledged were dangerous?

Are you sure that these cases would still be brought to court in your system?

The laws to which I refer…

In reply to Sadly, I’m not sure which laws you refer to…

…are those that see to it that when there is a demand, there will be someone to cater to it. If a case has merit and is likely to be won in a rational court system, then there will be a lawyer who will take it.

When I say “the case is good”, I mean one that can be won. Simple as that.

And yes, the “crackpot” cases would be brought to court, but only if there is legitimate science behind them. And yes, that would likely mean that most cigarette and asbestos cases would be thrown out.

John M.–you are sooooooo right

In reply to 20 years ago, I told people this is where this would be going

If one really thinks about this, a lot of people have written much verbiage on the initial subject. Put this in perspective, a whinney over-sensitized drama queen has contrived a situation that is a mere annoyance to ANY computer user, into a scenario where an employer of a small company (it has to be a small company given the minimal network infrastructure)has to contemplate a possibly ruinous legal situtation. It is all the fault of an unconscionably unethical, abusive, and legal thievary, plaintiffs bar. Their “novel” legal theories in time become established case law. Now, even the most frivolous of lawsuits have a serious financial impact on whoever the unlucky target of opportunity happens to be. Case in point, the subject at hand, “sexual harrassment.” The trial lawyers and opportunistic plaintiffs have contrived the term way beyond what a reasonable person would define it to be. I am still in amazement how such stupidity passes muster with 12 so called reasonable people called a jury. Yet it happens all of the time

Redirect the blame?

In reply to The answer is yes and no

Can/Shouldn’t the charges be directed to the sender/domain of the Porn SPAM?

Ideally, yes… but

In reply to Redirect the blame?

In a more perfect world the charges would be leveled against the sender. But what happens when you are the sender because your PC was infected with a mass-mailer’s spam program? Are you at fault for not ensuring that you had “adequate” anti-virus and spam filtering software on your home PC?

As has been noted a couple of times already, it is the company’s responsibility to make reasonable effort to provide a safe environment for workers.

So now the problem is to define “reasonable effort” and “safe environment”. That is where the water gets really deep and really muddy.

Letter to the Workplace Inbox

In reply to The answer is yes and no

At last, you, the email Inbox, find yourself the latest idea pad for a workplace lawsuit. Didn?t catch one out of twenty vulgar spams a day? Bingo, you are now known as the Inbox Pervert, the latest punching bag in office politics. (The guy who likes to touch everyone on the back is now off the hook.)

Read more: http://www.iwantmyess.com/?p=55

Good grief, just how bad are your filters?

In reply to Can porn spam be concidered Sexual Harassment to employees?

We absolutely NEVER get that stuff here! We get the Nigerian finance minister who needs help transfering his country’s welfare budget to an offshore bank. We get the stock tips. We even get the ads for *ahem* performance enhancement pharmaceuticals. Our filters are that lenient and err that greatly on the side of caution. But they never let through porn. Apparently it’s not that difficult to detect.

What is your company doing wrong?

Jurisdictions

In reply to Can porn spam be concidered Sexual Harassment to employees?

The laws regarding this are different in every jurisdiction.

If you don’t own the servers, how can you be held accountable. Does your provider allow you to define the filters?

James

I have to wonder

In reply to Jurisdictions

How small the budget is that you can’t download a copyof the Nuonce CentOS/Bluequartz implementation, round up a 40 GB HD, a PC to put it in, and a static IP address and handle your own e-mail?

(I forget just now whose spam filter is built in or mashed up with that, but I’ll edit later to add that.)

never heard of it before but worth a try, along with no-ip.com service…

In reply to I have to wonder

I’ve never heard of the combination that you mentioned in your post. It’s obviously some form of linux dist. with mail server software – do you have personal experience with this, is it difficult to setup? I’m a newbie when it comes to linux but this is something I would definitely want to check out.

Reply To: Can porn spam be concidered Sexual Harassment to employees?

In reply to Can porn spam be concidered Sexual Harassment to employees?

Fire her. this is the best solution because it is: A: Easier. and B: less trouble.

C

not so fast

In reply to Reply To: Can porn spam be concidered Sexual Harassment to employees?

she (& her lawer) will be soon be driving her (their) Farari to her (their) new house. At your ex-companys expence. (Fired due to non-tolorence of explicit, sexual in content, e-mails) I can see the news headlines already.

Reminds me of when …

In reply to not so fast

… I worked for a costume company the specialized in costumes for strippers, er, Gentlemen’s Club Entertainers.

The person they hired for e-mail sales was offended that the ladies would send in their measurements, pictures, yadda. Also didn’t like the collection of “You guys are great!!” autographed pictures on the owner’s wall. (Owner was a female.)

Fire her? No way.Let her grow up!

In reply to Reply To: Can porn spam be concidered Sexual Harassment to employees?

Whatever you do, you either loose some genuine customers (e-mails classed as spam when they aren’t)or you have to put up with v1agra, pen1s enhanc1ng or p0rn p1cs in you e-mails.
Tell her to get a life and get on with her job.
Anybody who uses computers will get spam/phishing e-mails.
Also: make sure she knows enough about computing to locate the Delete Key.
She will want to continue to get e-mails from Scunthorpe and may even want to know when Mr B10w is going to finish the j0b.
spam/ph1sh1ng/p0rn/c0ntent f1lter1ng isn’t that good. You still have to take a peek in the spam folder to see what shouldn’t be there.
Surely, harresmant is only when someone in the office sends her unacceptable e-mails.
The ones that she gets are just aimed at all of us who use PCs (or Macs).
Its a fact of life not aimed at her!

Not so

In reply to Fire her? No way.Let her grow up!

It took several months, several thousand dollars and a lot of studying algorhythms and creating heuristic lists, but I have seen nearly 3000 unwanted spam a day turn into 1 or 2 questionable emails a day.

It can be done, it isnt inevitable that you will get spam. I have received less than 5 unwanted emails EVER on my other company’s email account.

At the office now, I get perhaps one or two a day, down from hundreds.

To give up because your $99.00 solution or the inherent filter is useless is pathetic, speam can be beaten, it can be reduced to almost nothing.

I’ll tell ou first hand, to open your email inbox and find 120 WANTED emails is a great thing, spam is a thing of the past for me.

False +

In reply to Not so

Oz, what are you seeing for false positive rate?

Zip zippo nil

In reply to False +

Okay a bit strong maybe. At firt there were maybe a half dozen a week (at first), after a ew weeks it was down to perhaps 2 or 3 a week, and those are easily checked each day and also help to create better heuristic scans as they are added or deleted fomr the black list.

A goo dsolution utilizes several scanning styles, Huristic on the entire email,then keyword chek, then address/rbl check but none of these is the SOLE reason for declarig email spam, a weight from each test is given, once the total weight of the email reaches and exceeds YOUR predetermined level, it will be considered spam. If you want most to flow through at first, set the levsl high and sl;owly reduce them as the system trains itself based on what you want or don’t want.

Most systems are flawed in that they determine what you ewant, every company is different and allows/rejects different mail, it should be something YOU train and YOU tell it what is acceptable and what isn’t.

$4000.00+ is not unreasonable for such a solution.

If you have to check quaratine daily…

In reply to Zip zippo nil

“those are easily checked each day”.

If you have to check quarantine every day, what real improvement have you made? That was the strength of Brightmail. When I first installed it, its filter rate was about 90 percent effective, but zero false positive in the first 60,000 spams captured. After that I just dropped all spam into the bit bucket and never looked at quarantine again. Now THAT is productivity enhancing. Brightmail also has rules-based capture, and I suppose between the two you could hit a very high spam removal rate but you also increase the false positive rate — you must decide how much disaster it is to lose important email. Postini is probably the best but it is expensive and, once again, imposes a requirement to review quarantine. The whole point of anti-spam is so you don’t have to LOOK at it.

You declare the cost to be $4,000; but does that include your time on it? Brightmail is quite expensive, so is Postini. Administering Brightmail was trivial — out of the box and into the server, done. End of story; instant 90 percent removal. No bodda me with tuning rules every day.

yes so

In reply to Not so

you could be a billionaire Oz, if you sold your spam filter for $50 a pop every company in the world would buy it.
but companies that actually use email to recieve sales enquiries cant afford to lose ANY possible sales because their spam filters are locked down so tight.
And i’d say not that many could afford to employ someone full time to check all incoming emails and remove the dirty ones.
staff members need to LISTERN to network admins and DELETE emails that they can obviously see are spam BEFORE opening them.
Can a company sue a staff member who infects them with a virus because they were stupid and opened an email attachment they know they shouldnt have?

Yes so, read it this time

In reply to yes so

Nobody is a full time spam deleter/scanner/ It is a system that neexds to be monitored and trained (hour a day max) for a few weeks, months until it is setup properly.

Nobody said you wouldn’t get sales related email, I deployed it in a multinational sales office.

Yes the company can sue you, IF such a written company policy about opening such mail is applied. It is willful neglect of their equipment.

http://www.bluebottle.net/

In reply to Fire her? No way.Let her grow up!

Try running her account via
http://www.bluebottle.net/

They require mails to be verified. This probably cuts down on most spammers who are generally lazy people who won’t both with
going through the verification service.

There are other services.

Also there is mailwasher pro which allows you to stop a lot of spam. You have several options like this.

HOW completely wrong you are

In reply to Reply To: Can porn spam be concidered Sexual Harassment to employees?

B: less trouble

But then instead of a lawsuit for exposing her to offensive email, now the lawsuit is for wrongful dismissal. In that latter case, she stands to win a lot more money. One to two years on her arse, eating bon bons with full pay at your company’s expense.

How is that easier or less trouble?

Damn, it’s a good thing you don’t run a company, such a ridiculous mindset woul dsee you filing for bankruptcy in no time. That’s not a management mindset, that’s an armchair quarterback’s attitude.

Must be different in Oz, but here in Ohio …

In reply to HOW completely wrong you are

… you can be fired right now for no reason.

You get maybe six months of ? pay.

First of all you are wrong:

In reply to Must be different in Oz, but here in Ohio …

Secondly: No company would ever get away with firing me for no reason, I don’t care what state you are in. Your company would be paying for my next vacation.

EDIT: You are referring to the implementation of “Employment-at-will”. EAW does NOT allow for discharge due to sexual harassment claims, as it falls under sexual harrassment.

Have a read: http://www.lsc.state.oh.us/membersonly/employment.pdf

there’s now ay a company would get away with firing someone complaining about sexual harrassment in the workplace. ALso, how many com[panies in Ohio STILL employ staff with no formal written contract? If there’s a contract of employment, then there is no Employment-At-Will that they can look toward when letting someoe go.

Dear Einstein

In reply to First of all you are wrong:

Do you think they would put sexual harassment as the reason the girl was fired?
You are an employee at will. Your company CAN FIRE YOU FOR ANY REASON AT ANY TIME. In the USA good employees are valued, bad ones go away, it is that simple. We do not have stupid laws that guarantee jobs for POS employees.

Liste to what you just said….Einstein, LOL! :D

In reply to Dear Einstein

[i]”Your company CAN FIRE YOU FOR ANY REASON AT ANY TIME.”[/i]
They can make up a reason BUT it must be valid also. In most cases, companies have policies and must offer warning in writing several times befroe a final dismissal. In such cases (the vast majority as shown by the peers here) such policies are set in stone and adhered to like gospel. It makes it a little harder to fabricate a reason for dismissal without written and formal proof to support your claims.

You are SO close but not quite, you are right in that they do need a “REASON” to fire you, well said; but just ANY reason doesn’t usually cut it. Any VALID reason would be more accurate.

Now befre you go rabling on about the Good Ole US of A and how f***ed up your employment system is, how your totally inadequate government allows and compels your companies to treat your citizens with no respect etc.

I have spent many hours in US courtrooms listening and following MANY cases or wrongful dismissal. So it DOES happen and it happens quite often in a nation who loves to sue for just about anything you can dream of, including a free ride through life.

Yes, many very large companies get nailed on a regular basis for wrongful dismissal, it’s the people such as yourself that just layback and take it that help companies succeed in treating US citizens like sh*t. Your fellow patriots can thank you for being a complacent lamb that fears having a voice in the real world.

And NOBODY, NOBODY at ANYTIME said anything about guaranteeing jobs to POS employees…well except you of course.

If an accountant is hired and is then subject to offensive email subject lines, it is no different than the secretary being subject to two guys talking about p***y all day long. The company MUSt take measures to stop it, now if you consider that as a POS employee, then that explains why you are just another POS employee yourself, you don’t have the brains to be a POS boss.

Bad analogy.

In reply to Liste to what you just said….Einstein, LOL! :D

“If an accountant is hired and is then subject to offensive email subject lines, it is no different than the secretary being subject to two guys talking about p***y all day long. The company MUSt take measures to stop it”

A better analogy is a business that takes walk-in customers all day. At what point must the business “screen” walk-ins BEFORE the walk-in customer or potential customer reaches the receptionist? If a man walks in and is rude to the receptionist, it might be actionable in some jurisdictions, but it ought to be an action against the perpetrator, not the employer — although I can easily predict an out-of-control justice system holding the business owner liable since ya gotta sue SOMEONE.

Land of OZ

In reply to Liste to what you just said….Einstein, LOL! :D

Ahh in the land of OZ there must be time for such trivial things.
British Columbia now is that actually Canadian or is it British?
2 Facts
1 I would be a Boss if I did not have to put up with P***ies like you. I used to be a Service Manager but I could not stand all the crying.
2 You can be fired at anytime for any reason in the USA. Sure you can waste your time in court, then no other company worth its salt would even want you around, no matter how good you were. As a matter of fact, once you go to the personnel office and compain about someone or something in your company, your career there is OVER. Anyway why would you want to stay at a company that makes you so miserable? Can’t get a real job? or just don’t feel like working?

Not if there is a company handbook/policy

In reply to Dear Einstein

Ohio is an “Employment at will” state, UNLESS the company has a handbook or policy manual that states reasons or actions that an employee can be disnissed for.
Now back to the issue…. Spam is a national problem affecting everyone, not just her. Explain her rights to report spam to the reporting agencies. If her problem continues, and she is still getting offensive spam, invest is an anti-spam software program for her computer. Let her computer be the test unit. If the software works well, keep it in mind when the next person complains.
Placing part of the responsibilty on her to report it and you to try and filter it, should prove to any court that you are making a good faith attempt to correct the situation.

Not here

In reply to Must be different in Oz, but here in Ohio …

In Ontario, and I believe the rest of Canada, though labour laws are generally provincial in jurisdiction, you cannot fire without cause. You can lay someone off, in which case you owe them severence (no severence required when you fired, but many do anyway to ensure you have less grounds to sue).

To fire you have to have grounds – incompetence is one, but hard to prove (the onus is on the employer to prove that they did everything possible to train and coach the employee). Another is violation of policies (have to prove that employee was aware of policy), another is gross misconduct.

The point is, you can’t just fire someone in most jurisdictions, with the exception of some US states where the law has been changed to favour the employer.

James

Just another reason working in Canada is better

In reply to Not here

The list is endless James, but working in Canada is so much better than the USA. I came So close to packing up everything here and moving my business south, SO close. But when I closed my US interests instead, I was far better off.

Canadian employment law protects employees from bullish companies.

US law, protects bullish companies from mistreated and upset employees.

But what do you really get?

In reply to Just another reason working in Canada is better

“Canadian employment law protects employees from bullish companies.”

Perhaps that is why the United States is more or less de-facto ruler of the free world. Whether anyone likes it or not, government elevation of employees to something like miniature demi-gods does not bode well for business efficiency.

The obvious exception is when nearly all employees are hard working and honorable and business does not have to worry much about them. Vancouver, BC is quite a lot like other Pacific Northwest cities (I’m from that area) and the social situation is just not like the rest of the world. You just cannot export your ideas unless and until you can export your work ethic and culture.

Iceland is an example of a nation where social welfare works very well; but it is almost perfectly homogenous as to culture and race. You cannot export your ideas to the United States, or the former Soviet Union, and for the same reason — a society that can barely be called a society with such extreme diversity of culture and value.

90 day probationary period for new employees…

In reply to Not here

… allows you to let go of any new hires within 90 days of them being hired without any reason whatsoever. Since this is a new employee it may be applicable.

This happens in Winnipeg all the time, I’ve seen it personally (thankfully not to myself) at my own company and at others. I can’t speak for other states or provinces, but I know how it works locally and it may be worth looking into at your end.

True in Ontario but is it ethical?

In reply to 90 day probationary period for new employees…

You will probably find that there is a probation period, actually up to 6 months but is this the correct approach? If the complaint is just about the pornographic email, then fix the problem.

The probationary period can be useful if the person is not fitting in other ways.

Investigate and act

In reply to True in Ontario but is it ethical?

The issue here is not the spam.

The issue is that you have an employe who feels it’s all right to threaten her company with a law suit for something that’s got nothing to do with the company per se.

That’s a BAD indicator. It tells you a lot about how she feels toward the company, and this ain’t good. What else is she up to? Is she actually doing her job?

Has she realized she is supposed to help the society succeed, and that’s why she gets a pay check at the end of the month?

If I was in your position, I would find out if she actually gets products on her job. (Is it worth it to have her on the job in the first place or was she hired because HR liked her looks?)

if she is a productive employe, I would call her in and show her the spam in my inbox. Then I would tell her it’s a concern of mine as well, and that I would like her to help me find an cost effective solution.

Funny as it is, people can completely turn around when you ask them to help you.

If she turns out to be a real waste to the company (quite likely), I would get all the specifics/evidences and send her packing.

This complain is a warning signal that there is something wrong, and the “threat” part tells you that this girl means trouble. She could have just as well made her point without threats.

common sense vs. pissing contests

In reply to Must be different in Oz, but here in Ohio …

Heeellllo: Are we talking about a little common sense here, or do we want to get into pissing contests about due diligence, expensive servers, right to fire, wrongful termination lawsuits, or some jerk telling a small business owner, who keeps expenses REAL low, who is obviously unsophisticated (spelling and typos)that “It took several months, several thousand dollars and a lot of studying algorhythms(sp) and creating heuristic lists.” Lets get real here. Spam is most readily recognizable by the e-mail sender address and the subject line. If the subject line says “hot babes want your body,” or “viagra cheap.” How smart ya gotta be to figure out this is not a legitimate sales order from a usual customer. You just don’t open it up. There is a teeny tiny little box there that says delete. You might have to teach the poor dear how to check a check box. (while you are at it, you can teach your pet fish how to swim) Am I suggesting that the lady in question might be a bit intellectually challenged? Oh dear me, of course not. The person who hired her in the first place is

Down here, viability of wrongful discharge suit would depend on the state.

In reply to HOW completely wrong you are

In “at will” states, the employer need not show cause as grounds for termination.

In such states both the employer and the employee are free to terminate thier relationship “at will.”

do please be aware of vastly different jurisdictions

In reply to HOW completely wrong you are

Many states in the United States allow a person to be fired for no reason at all; in fact, it is better to not give a reason in such cases. If the company is in such a state, and is a small business, it may well be cheaper to look for a different employee than to deploy expensive anti-spam AND its even more expensive administrator. It is just a thought; it would be better for everyone to use some kind of anti-spam, but this person seems intolerant.

oh yeah – thats the way to avoid a lawsuit

In reply to Reply To: Can porn spam be concidered Sexual Harassment to employees?

Do not fire her, but dont assume that she has a brain either.

Has anyone actually explained to her that those emails are not being sent by anyone who works at the company?

She may think those emails are coming from a co-worker. The emails may even be addressed from a co-worker.

Fire her for….

In reply to Reply To: Can porn spam be concidered Sexual Harassment to employees?

Fire her for looking at porn on company time and computers….

You’re prime for a lawsuit

In reply to Reply To: Can porn spam be concidered Sexual Harassment to employees?

That type of attitude will get you a sexual harassment AND wrongful termination lawsuit (with possible negligence thrown in). The worst possible things you can do, in order are:
1) Fire her.
2) Ignore her.

If you fire her, you give her an ironclad case for wrongful termination (which still applies even in right-to-work states because it is FEDERAL law). You give her a substantial case for sexual harassment as she can argue that your permissive attitude led to a “hostile workplace.”

If you ignore her complaints, you actually increase the probability of a sexual harassment suit because she will be able to demonstrate management’s lack of proactivity.

The best way to handle it is to take her complaints seriously. Commend her for notifying them and then take action. Put her on the team for finding a solution (spam filter, etc.). This will not only eliminate any possibility for a lawsuit, but will make her feel better abou working for you.

Oh, and for any of you guys who suggested firing her, you are treading a VERY dangerous line of contributing towards a “hostile workplace.” Permitting sexually related content that others fid offensive in the workplace is grounds for termination in the smart company because it lessens their liability for a sexual harassment suit. Most companies now have updated their employee policies to prohibit anything even close to sexual harassment as immediate grounds for temination. Be a man and respect women.

its got nothing to do with not respecting women

In reply to You’re prime for a lawsuit

its got nothing to do with not respecting women, any calls from people saying fire her are because she is obviously someone who will cause trouble the first chance she gets….two or three emails and shes calling sexual harrasment, please.

and i think we need to clarify, obviously if you are doing nothing at all to block spam and let through explicit email subject lines to staff then you deserve to get sued. But any cheap filter solution allows you to block rude words and variation of rude words from subject lines. That therefore eliminates any need for her to feel harrassed.

Turn off the reading pane, show her the delete key and explain to her how spam works (she obviously has no idea). I dont think you need to set up a special spam fighting team and spend thousands blocking every last scrap of spam…..and commending her for threatening to sue you, gimmie a break.

You’ve obviously never been a party

In reply to its got nothing to do with not respecting women

to a harassment claim or been involved in the legalities. ANY hesitation by the company managers to PROMPTLY address sexual harassment is a huge legal liability. You MUST treat ANY alleged harassment IMMEDIATELY and SERIOUSLY.

The excuses that she’s just going to complain later on about something else are IRRELEVANT to the sexual harassment claim. The idea of using complaints of illegality to judge someone’s usefulness to the business is absurd, not to mention explicitly forbidden by law (whistleblower statutes). The attitude of treating her as a liability is what perpetuates poor management mentalities.

The point of sexual harassment law is that noone should have to deal with it in the workplace AT ALL. Turning off the preview pane is an unacceptable solution because it does absolutely nothing to address the root cause – and in legal terms this is known as not just negligence, but gross negligence.

People do not normally bring up sexual harassment to pick a fight. They do so because it genuinely affects them and their ability to maintain focus on their work. Sexual harassment is a huge distraction because of the psychological effects it has. Do your business and its employees a favor and treat sexual harassment seriously, or trust me you’ll end up on the losing end of a lawsuit.

YES.!.

In reply to Can porn spam be concidered Sexual Harassment to employees?

Always, the answer is YES.!. At home, no-one cares. (unless you have a home-business). In any type of a business enviroment, it’s tabu. (Just see the news head-lines from the last few days). Even if no-one complains, (that can & does change) have need to remember that ALL corespondence, records, (& just about anything else now) MUST be archived, and kept by law. (say ouch now) If 5 years from now, a request for ALL incomming trafic from yesterday is served, you’ll have no control over who will see what you just viewed (ouch again, louder) If there is something missing, or a gap, (well, I removed it) you will be suspect of removing imformation. (stupidity is no deffence). -more than just my 2 cents here. -d

What law?

In reply to YES.!.

You say that all emails must be kept for 5 years by law. What law is that? Our policy is that no emails are kept past 1 month, unless the user archives them on a different server or drive. I don’t know of any place that can permanently store the tremendous amount of emails that come in.

Since our policy states that we don’t keep it beyond one month, we aren’t responsible for keeping them beyond that period.

depends on location

In reply to What law?

in the US, you could start with SOX

Glad we aren’t SOX

In reply to depends on location

… at my part time job. E-mail taken off the server by the client PC is GONE. Same for IM.

unfortunatly :-(

In reply to Glad we aren’t SOX

You are.!. under SOX, you just haven’t been hit with it -YET-. and there’s more. the Tech-Rep even had a list (under compliences, somewhere) any thing relating to any thing medical has a seperate additional bunch too. So does the finance field. Now, legaly you have everything.

SOX does not cover every business

In reply to depends on location

I worked for a college that was not covered by SOX. it was covered by FERPA but did not have any regulation that covered how long emails needed to be kept.

Additionally, I now work for an accounting firm. Again, Not covered by SOX because we donot handle the any corporations that are covered by SOX.

So they may or may not be covered by that legislation.

There’s one for you too..

In reply to SOX does not cover every business

The whole Finance & Accounting Industry is well covered in Compliance laws. Just check: http://www.cuna.org/compliance/ just as an example. That’s the tip of the legal iceberg.

Regulations Yes. SOX No

In reply to There’s one for you too..

My point is that there we are not necessarly required to comply with SOX regulations.

Compliance to regulations vary from business.

In my relative short carrer, I have had to comply with HIPPA(that is that health one you mentioned), FERPA, SOX, and several others. What I have learned is that none apply in every circumstance. Further, I have learned not to tell anyone that they must comply with any regulation because the complexity of the regulations.

SOX pertains to publicly traded companies

In reply to depends on location

SOX does not automatically apply to EVERY company, or for that matter, not even very many. It gets the big ones of course. Is there anyone here that has not contemplated for a few seconds the cost of archiving every single email (including spam!) that was sent to your business? I suspect the cost of it would exceed the gross receipts of the average mom-and-pop small business.

That would be

In reply to What law?

found under the telecommunications or radio television act, I can’t remember which, but that is for US and Canada though the name varies.

Postini

In reply to YES.!.

Check out Postini’s message management service.

http://www.postini.com

Since we’ve subscribed I’ve gone from 30+ spam messages a day to perhaps one per week, and the porn stuff NEVER gets through. They also do a good job blocking viruses. Well worth it.

There are programs

In reply to Can porn spam be concidered Sexual Harassment to employees?

There are far too many programs out now that will & do filter porno, or explicit sexual e-mails. Even if they are not (yet) 100% you have tools to stop that trafic. Not doing so Will put your company in jeperdy. (Failure to protect employies from ……objectional material, = same as harassment itself) You will get nailed, sooner or later.

at the very least, swap outlook express for another free email client…

In reply to There are programs

like Mozilla Thunderbird,
I recently installed it on one of the workstations I have at home and I think it’s a very decent mail client and apparently it’s built in junk mail/spam mail filter is top notch.

Outlook Express doesn’t have a junk mail/spam mail filter built into that I know of. If you must stay with Outlook express, maybe invest in a product like CloudMark’s Spamnet desktop which works with OE v5 or 6 to stop spam from getting in. There are no doubt probably other products you can use with Outlook Express to filter out the spam. I will do a search & post my results here as well.

Can’t afford

In reply to There are programs

If you company is more than willing to afford the possible lawsuit from not trying to filter out spam then I say stick with OE.

Now on the other hand you can purchase OL2003 for $97.95 or cheaper if you buy volume licensing or as others have said use Thunderbird. Of purchase an email filtering program. Spamnet costs $40 per year and works great for OE.

Being an IT person you must do research to save your company $$ for other than just IT.

Thank you

In reply to Can porn spam be concidered Sexual Harassment to employees?

Thank you for the responses.

Up until now we have left it up to the ISP’s to filter the spam and they have done a fair job. But since some do get through everyday and a couple of the are pornography links, we are going to invest in Outlook for the workstations to protect the employees and the company. I know it’s built in filtering does a good job and will be a step in the right direction.

Don’t Fall For it

In reply to Thank you

Outlook’s Filters are worthless. They changed them in the Office 2003 version and broke them. On or PCs with Office XP we have much better control over pornographic spam. You need to look at a server level spam filter. If your ISP cannot block pornogrphic spam then get a new ISP. Don’t give yourself the Outlook Headache, unless there are other features in Outlook that you company cannot live without.

CA’s spam filer

In reply to Thank you

CA’s eTrust over Outlook. You have to check the spam folder early on to catch new addresses (and that IS where mail from new senders lands) but beyond that is great.

I oculdn’t handle 8 inbound domain mailboxes any other way.

L

Beating a dead horse

In reply to CA’s spam filer

” You have to check the spam folder early on to catch new addresses”

Ladies and gentlemen, the whole point of this exercise is so that employees with delicate constitutions do not have to EVER look at spam. Any solution that requires a sensitive employee to inspect her spam is worse than the disease.

No!

In reply to Can porn spam be concidered Sexual Harassment to employees?

If no one else gets this type of spam and you use email filters. What is your email protection, do you use a good protective email border protection?
I have used websence,Norton and Exchange.
If someone tells use they are getting bad stuff in thier email we go into the filters, thier email and thier computer to see what they have been doing. Almost every time it’s been that they have gone to a website and responded to an add or filled out a online form. Or they saw a popup on a site and went to the link.
This gives out thier and your network info and thier email. Or they went to a site that was compromised, evil hackers have hijacked the servers and now are running bots.
I would tell the manager you are looking into it and let them know that you will need to access all thier files on thier computer.
Now would be a good time to remind them that the computer they are using and all programs are company property. And any thing done on the same computer is company property.
Remove computer and put a new one in its place.
I know this by heart because I have done this many times; the computer will go to who ever dose your inspection. A few times it was me!
If the person leaves quickly, then ghost the drive and save it. If they go to court be sure you are certified to do computer forensic’s because you may be called into court.
But most of the time when you tell them that you need to check all of the places that they have been, they back down.

Legal Decision

In reply to Can porn spam be concidered Sexual Harassment to employees?

I would assume, if you put forth all effort to limit it, she could still file a suit, but it would go no where.

However, your company should have a law firm give you their opinion and consultation. They should be able to provide case law one way or the other.

Of course you’re at fault.

In reply to Can porn spam be concidered Sexual Harassment to employees?

(1) All employees are required to use the company email address and client you assigned them.

(2) You weren’t diligent enough in the first place to have prevented incoming porn from being delivered to the email client that you required her to use as a condition of her employment.

Server side controls are the professional way to solve corporate network problems like the ones you described, but even client side prevention is so cheap it’s ridiculous to purchase the hardware, operating system and productivity software without also including a full security suite. If the story you describe is true, I’d be polishing my resume, not planning for a long future with that kind of company. It won’t last long with that approach to business.

I agree

In reply to Of course you’re at fault.

First, I’m not a legal expert; however, every HR-mandated anti-harrassment course I’ve taken says that the company is obligated to protect its employees from any and all sexually inappropriate materials. This extends to the delivery guy who comes into your building (he can’t make inappropriate comments to your employees) or clients you meet with off-site (they can’t either). If an employee is performing their job (whether onsite or off), there is the expectation that they be protected from harrassment.

So regardless of who hosts the server or who handles the filter, I could see where, legally, you could be required to keep these e-mails away from employee inboxes. And, even though it is hard, I don’t think your company would be excused by saying that you tried your best.

Imagine if you tried that in a face-to-face situation. For example, if “Rick” is harrassing “Rita” at the office by making inappropriate comments, do you think the company would be able to get out of it by saying, “Well, sure he is still doing it now and then, but we gave it our best shot to get him to quit doing it?”

There may be specific legislation governing harrassment and electronic communications; however, based on the general rule I’ve had reinforced through training courses, your company has a responsibility to protect employees from inappropriate material in the workplace. I’m not sure to what lengths companies are expected to go to make this happen, though.

I’m not a legal expert either

In reply to I agree

But I understand something about the principles of causation, coercion and responsibility. My starting premise is that use of the equipment which eventually relayed pornographic spam to an employee was required by the employer. Ergo, responsibility for control of that equipment lies with that employer.

I’d like to offer a variation on your scenario involving “Rick” and “Rita”.

sMoRTy71: [Imagine if you tried that in a face-to-face situation. For example, if “Rick” is harrassing “Rita” at the office by making inappropriate comments, do you think the company would be able to get out of it by saying, “Well, sure he is still doing it now and then, but we gave it our best shot to get him to quit doing it?”]

Absolutely replies: Imagine the employer makes a list of banned words, and suppose that those are all crass names for human body parts. But suppose they fail to ban the phrase, or variants with same meaning: “Have sex with me or you’re fired!”

I use a default block policy on my email, and I’m just an individual working for a wage. Why on Earth would a company use a default allow policy?

question…

In reply to I agree

doesn’t your example place the onus of responsibility to stop spam email on the company that employs the user & provides the user with email access rather than the original source/sender of the spam email.

That just doesn’t seem right to me.
Spam is just way too prolific nowadays – it’s like a global epidemic, you can’t get around it, it’s never solicited (almost never, you can’t get around those brainiacs which provide everyone with their email address) and yet if I interpret what you’re saying correctly, in the end it’s the company’s fault for allowing spam to get into the user’s inbox. Doesn’t the scenario allow the spammer/sender of said spam emails to get off free without any responsibility? I’m no lawyer but IMHO I think you’ll have a hard time getting that one to stick.

Not the company’s responsibility…

In reply to question…

Does anyone knows a law that request company to provide spam filtering for emails?

If she is offended so easily, you can inform her that she is allowed to install a spam filter of her choice providing that she does not block communications from customers or coworkers.

As a note on Outlook, I use Outlook, I use filters and I still get a couple hundred pieces of spam per day, so don’t expect Outlook to solve your problem.

(Besides, your problem is the girl. Not Spam).

Out-sourcing doesn’t discharge you

In reply to Of course you’re at fault.

from protecting your employees from harassment.

It’s the company’s choise to outsource the(a) service, so if the company wants to protect its employees, as it legally is obliged to, it has to make agreements with the service-deliverer to prevent harassment.

Rob

Out-sourcing?

In reply to Out-sourcing doesn’t discharge you

An agreement with the service provider isn’t good enough, either. If they don’t set up a mail server themselves, with effective filters, they are at the mercy of the provider’s competence, or lack of it.

Depends on the contract.

In reply to Out-sourcing?

If the contract states that the service-provider has to take care (making them responsible) of the right filters on penalty that the consequences are upon them if not doing so (plus an extra penalty for not doing so), they have to and will do take care.

Question is, if it still is cheaper to out-source the service or do it yourself. And there lies the pain for this company. As they use outlook express I guess they have a lot of other “free-ware” spinning around. I guess they don’t have the money to make the deal I suggested.

But it could be arranged if they could find some other company’s that face the same issue. If they do find more company’s with this same problem … (can?t imagine there ain?t any others in the neighborhood)
Well, bundling forces could give them the finance to do it themselves.

Rob

1 Linux mail server

In reply to Depends on the contract.

I find it hard to believe that this expense is beyond the financial capability of any company that can afford the licensing fees of doing business.

It is very unlikely

In reply to 1 Linux mail server

that they couldn’t afford such an investment. As I can’t see what profits or other investments they make I’m not in the position to judge on that.
But as you state it isn’t much of an effort to do so. Maybe it’s in the management of such a system that they can’t. Again I’m not in the position to judge on it.

There are a zillion things I can think about of what is keeping them back on installing the right systems and none of them is one that holds on not installing a spam/harassment filtering system.
What I do know is that they can be held responsible for the harassment of their employees and can be convicted. Any penalty comming out of that can be multiple the costs as what such a system would cost them.

I for sure would count my blessings and get the proper system setup right away!

Rob

don’t be so quick…

In reply to Of course you’re at fault.

– let’s remember that not every company will have financial resources sufficient to purchase products that assist with the type of problem they’re experiencing. Sounds to me that if they’re using Outlook Express as the defacto standard email client in their organization then they’re probably using alot of other freeware to supplement their software needs. Software can be very expensive, and the companies that can’t afford software have 2 options: use cheaper or free alternatives which attempt to meet their needs or pirate software which is illegal but we all know that plenty of companies do it.

Using Outlook express and simple email services provided by the local ISP would indicate that the budget is shoestring – what else do you want him to do, he clearly is saying that they don’t have the money to spend in this area.

Client side prevention can be cheap but multiplied against many users can quickly escalate to something expensive.

Try to remember just because you & your company can afford something doesn’t mean every other company can. You don’t know the type of business they’re in, the number of employees they have, their current financial situation weak or strong, other mitigating factors that prevent them from doing other things, don’t make assumptions on data that hasn’t been provided. Until you have the whole picture you should reserve that type of judgement.

– that’s it, just my 0.02 cents

Been there, done that.

In reply to Can porn spam be concidered Sexual Harassment to employees?

With the company too cheap to purchase a real mail server, spam filtering was extremely limited. I started to hear complaints of spam coming in with “enlarge your (member),” “do more with Viagra,” etc. One female coworker asked when (not if) I could put a stop to it. When I told her that while I would do whatever I can that I can only do so much and can’t make any guarantees, in the mean time just delete it. I explained to her about our company’s reliance on email, and over-filtering would block legit email as false-positives. When she persisted in getting 100% no spam, I offered to either delete her email account or shut down the mail server. She finally backed off and took my suggestion of using the “delete” key.

Familiar

In reply to Been there, done that.

That situation sounds very similar to what we have here. We won’t be able to upgrade to our own e-mail servers for at least a year or two. In the mean-time, this employees want to recieve ALL of the previous employee’s e-mails. Some accounts are over eight years old and have even been posted on the company website.

Needless to say, she gets a lot of junk mail. She doesn’t want to recieve this, yet on the other hand she doesn’t want to risk losing any real messages.

For now I’ve recieved approval to upgrade her to Outlook and I will monitor the junk folder to see how it is working.

Correction

In reply to Been there, done that.

“I explained to her about our company’s reliance on email, and over-filtering would block legit email as false-positives.”

3000 apsm/day, 2 or 3 questionable/day, 0 false positives through three week priod.

It takes, a multiple weighting system, not just a filter list, RBL or some inaccurate method. Use all methods and create a total unacceptable ‘weight’ mail thet hits enough categories is overweight and considered SPAM.

GWAVA or GW Guardian.

On the contrary…

In reply to Correction

The mail server we (now they, as I have left) were using was MDaemon, not Exchange. MDaemon does have spam filtering available based on “weight,” but since we were experiencing greater-than-zero false positives, all we could do was tag it as spam and pass it on. By tagging, I mean the subject line would have [***SPAM(score)/(threshold)***] inserted, then use Outlook’s filtering to place it in a “spam” folder.

Of course, some people would then see their legit email tagged as spam and, of course, complain. (Well, at least they got it!) So, of course, we had to add specific domains to the “white list” so as to bypass the spam filter… but that “white list” couldn’t differentiate email whose return address was spoofed from those that were (again) legit. How many times have you received a phishing email supposedly from admin@support.ebay.com (for example) but was really from nobody@2guys-scamming.flybynight.ru? MDaemon says, “Oh, it’s from ebay.com. They’re on our white list. Pass it on with no spam check.”

More often the white list would be fooled by a self-propagating virus that has spoofed a known person’s address as its return address. And of course there would always be some knucklehead in our end-user community who would call up saying, “I got this email, and I’m trying to open the attachment, but this window keeps popping up saying a virus was detected.”

“Uh… well… ok, listen to me. The attachment you’re trying to open IS THE VIRUS! STOP TRYING TO OPEN IT!”

Anyway, new job, new company with a real mail server, and best of all: the mail server will never fall under my responsibility.

Happy day! 🙂

As I was typing!

In reply to On the contrary…

What do I receive? Best of all, the hyperlink doesn’t even work! 😀

From: Chase Online Banking

> Dear Chase Bank client,

> Technical services of the Chase Bank are carrying out a planned software upgrade. We earnestly ask you to visit the following link to start the procedure of confirmation on customers data.

> To get started, please click the link below:

> https://chaseonline.chase.com/accountservices.jsp

> This instruction has been sent to all bank customers and is obligatory to fallow.

> We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause, and appreciate your assistance in helping us maintain the integrity of the entire Chase system. Thank you for your prompt attention to this matter.
>
> Sincerely,
>
> The Chase Bank Team
>
> Please do not reply to this e-mail. Mail sent to this address cannot be answered. For assistance, log in to your Chase Bank account and choose the “Help” link in the header of any page.
>
> ? 2006 JPMorgan Chase & Co.security manager
>
> Becky Draftel

~fallow~

In reply to As I was typing!

“This instruction has been sent to all bank customers and is obligatory to fallow.”

What? The people at Chase Bank can’t even spell? I’m withdrawing my funds.

It’s hard to believe how ridiculous the phishers are and that people actually fall for it.

People only read every third or forth word

In reply to ~fallow~

and make the rest up from those few words. When you think about it one third of a sentace is composed of useless (sort of useless, adjectives, emphasis and the like) words so a person is reading about half of what is actually displayed.

People fall for it because they dont know any better and for the most part they dont want to know any better. I try to educate (non-techincal) people about the dangers of the products they are using (Use AV, get a better firewall than the MS standard, Dont use IE, Keep your system patched) but for the most part they stare at me blankly as if I am mad.

Kinda missed my point

In reply to On the contrary…

I noted two goo dsolutions also, GWAVA and GWGuardian, neither designd for Exchange.

There are also blade style appliances made by both that sit between either the dmarc and teh mail server (nothign get to teh server) or simply before the desktop (scanning anything coming in/going out, including webbased mail) so that it’s not delivered.

One col thing is how easy it is to redirect and capure employee mail if you need to track it. I caught people sending resumes, passing off client info for lead cash etc. Great way to cull the herd. 😉

Kinda missed my point, too…

In reply to Kinda missed my point

The company was too damn cheap to pay for anything real. They even balked at an upgrade of MDaemon from version 6 to version 8 (difference: 4 years and lots of features, including enhanced granular spam control). Cost? $1,500.00. Company revenues: $80 million anually. Employee count: 450. The president was too cheap to shell out $1500 for an upgrade to MDaemon to benefit the whole company, but he didn’t even blink an eye when he shelled out $3000 for a top-of-the-line laptop with docking station and another $100 for a spam control software package to work on his own email client.

Uh… do the math…

(and why did I quit?)

Cull the herd, eh?

In reply to Kinda missed my point

“One col thing is how easy it is to redirect and capure employee mail if you need to track it. I caught people sending resumes, passing off client info for lead cash etc. Great way to cull the herd.”

What were you saying about bullish companies and the wonderful Canadian rights of employees? Email is so very easy to fake; maybe in Canada this is the way to get rid of someone.

WHAA WHAA!!!

In reply to Can porn spam be concidered Sexual Harassment to employees?

I cant help but be ashamed at everyone’s whinning over little things. I’ll bet she’s emotionally scarred and cant sleep. I’ll bet she sure has seen movies that have nudity and so forth. Sounds like she is smelling money and guaranteed employment. This kind of complaint removes any possibility of firing due to legal constraints. We have all turned into a bunch of ambulence chasing cry babies wanting to be heard, I’m nobody, but now I’m somebody because I have an issue. How utterly pathetic. If this offends you, then this what offends me until everyone is in a freeforall like the South Park episode. I think everyone needs to grow up and realize that you cannot control every facet of life to make everyone happy at all times. Being an adult is handling situations like an adult, not like a whinny child. If someone is acting inappropriate towards her is a different story, not an email that gets through. Politically correctness ruined our country giving everyone a voice to complain about the most mundane things. It’s intent was to increase tolerance, instead it did the exact opposite.

If I were you I would only grant her internal email capability. If she doesnt need external email capability then it cant come in, until you implement a better filtering policy

Ouch! You cannot be serious…

In reply to WHAA WHAA!!!

Well, now. As a complete outsider I’ve followed this one with interest. Generally speaking, and whether people like ‘jkaras’ like it or not, social convention demands a little more sympathy -particularly where female staff are involved. I don’t have a problem with that, in fact I would encourage it as I believe employers and Line Managers have to be seen to be ‘doing the right thing’. Why is it such a problem to treat this employee’s problem seriously and deal with it accordingly? The other point that occured to me was that here, in the UK, we look upon the US as a litigious society – sorry but that’s how it is! Why then, are there posts actively encouraging action that would ultimately lead to litigation? I also noticed a post that stated how those responisble for this type of Spam were only making a living. That’s tantamount to saying that parasites are only trying to stay alive by infecting a host… Personally, I would like to see stiff jail terms inflicted on those who insist on sending this filth over the internet. After all, would we tolerate it arriving through our front door in the ordinary mail? By the way, Spamfighter does work because we use it for a site-to-site database system that is largely driven by email through Outlook.

Unfortunately yes

In reply to Ouch! You cannot be serious…

The reason for my harsh criticism was from his qoute of her. “This is now border line harassing! Some employees would consider this
sexual harassment.”

Sorry but this isnt sexual harrassment. It is not deliberate from a certain person, it is an unfortunate byproduct of the internet. Nothing in this world is perfect or free from poor or uncomfortable instances. I like many people get the occasional viagra advertisements that get past the filtering due to clever play on words or clever spelling. Is this the end of the world? Do I want some women walking past my desk seeing this kind of subject that she draws her own conclusion? No, but it will happen, I dont need to seek counseling or loss of sleep over it. Does it belong in the work place? No, but neither does many things that happen that make us go home mad after a hard days work.

A person threatening legal action like this either wants some attention like she’s somebody, or she is looking for a payout/job security. There has to be established intent of malice, which there isnt. You can argue that incompetance is a part played in this happening, but spammers are very good at their craft and can always exploit a way eventually, so there is no 100% guarantee in life no matter how well planned or money spent. Who’s to say she didnt sign up an account with her work email address to create the situation?

Sorry but I believe in equality, her being a woman makes no difference, she is an adult and should be able to face a situation with tact and understanding, not threats. She could report the issue and express an opinion that she would like something done about it, but not threaten legal action. When I get a viagra ad or hey my name is wanna meet, I should act the same way? Why cant I? Harrassment isnt spelled female and they dont have it defined as femine. I am as chivilrous as the next guy, but not to the extreme that they cant mentally handle an embarrassing situation. I give women a bit more credit. I just feel our society has degenerated into a oh woes is me attitude followed by some sort of compensation.

I get your point and I am not trying to flame your response, if I came off harsh in this post it wasnt my intent.

well said

In reply to Unfortunately yes

well said…if not a little harsh!
but i do agree, the staff i work with are all grown up enough to hit the delete key on those emails and get back to work.
If I did get someone come to me siting sexual harrassment and lawsuits I would tell them that I would divert all their emails to my inbox and personally go through each and every one to make sure they were clean before forwarding to him/her. I bet that would shut them up.

Sorry to say but people who want to sue over things that are in their control are only after one thing, and it isnt a better society for all.

No offence taken!

In reply to Unfortunately yes

No offence taken! This is an emotive subject and, as such, it is difficult to respond to in neutral terms. It is a sad reflection of the times we live in that lawyers have found a way to cynically exploit our most personal phobias and problems. It is also sad to reflect that the type of help offered to the individual has become trivialised by exploitative individuals. Two simple examples: a local shopping mall where a child threw a coin in the fountain. The coin bounced hitting the child (uninjured) whose parents attempted to sue. There was, however , a notice stating that objects shouldn’t be thrown in… First Aid at Work – I’ve just renewed my certificate but a lot of my colleagues have said they wont. Why? Because they’re worried about being sued, in fact I know of a first-aider who was. He saved the patient’s life but in order to do so had to cut away an – apparently – expensive pullover. We no longer live in a sane world, in fact the lunatics are probably in charge of the asylum.

deep do-do if… Guaranteed.!.

In reply to Can porn spam be concidered Sexual Harassment to employees?

sexualy explicit e-mails from an unknown sourse. Not Good. The firm has NO defence if the female employee / manager claims, even feels, that they were sent deliberatly! (and could be from a former: customer, employee, boss, lover, or anything) The company HAD FAILED to protect her. In any court of law = Guilty! It’s negligence, and ignorance is NOT a deffence in ANY Court of Law. Whatever excuse they might have, for whaterer reason, they did NOT act to the fullest to protect their employees. Any half-witt Lawer (in this case, 1/4 wit) will be very happy to take this one & WIN.!. Guaranteed.

You are definitely not a lawyer.

In reply to deep do-do if… Guaranteed.!.

A company does not have to “act to the fullest to protect their employees” when “the female employee / manager claims, even feels, that they were sent deliberatly!”.

The employee has to prove her expectations/beliefs were reasonable (not just a “feeling”) and the company has to show they made a reasonable effort to deal with the problem.

It is impossible to stop spam (without shutting off your server). Ignorance is not a defence buy impossibility is. Impossibility is a terrific legal defense. It worked for years for the tobacco companies – it is impossible to make a safe cigarette. It doesn’t work for the auto industry because it is possible to make safe cars.
No one, not even the U.S. government or Microsoft has found a way to make spam proof email.

That is correct

In reply to You are definitely not a lawyer.

I am not a lawer. Never claim to be. I’ve worked with quite a few though, some good, some bad. But all usually won. If only it was Spam. That’s the tricky part. If it were that, all the computers and all the users would be complaining. (ok, on different levels, and to a different scale maybe) But if Only 1 person is getting hit, and that 1 person happeneds to female. And higher management blew her off because of that. The Company WILL have a big problem.

yes and heres why

In reply to Can porn spam be concidered Sexual Harassment to employees?

First of all, we all know that generally, for you to get porn spam, you have to visit certain types of websites. Yes, I know and agree that it comes with all sorts of mail not just sex sites. Even if you visit dating sites they start to pop up. So the employee(s) are doing something they should not be doing while at work to begin with.
As for emails, the first thing an employee should do, as well as an admin, is to go into mail settings and stop spam. This doesnt stop everything sent, but in general it helps avoid most spam.

No you don’t

In reply to yes and heres why

“for you to get porn spam, you have to visit certain types of websites.”

Whatever gave you that idea? Just using your email as an alias here (just as you did, and that’s why TR removes the domain from your email address)will have your address picked up by spiders. Once enough names are gathered by the bot, they are easily sold to spamers for LARGE dollars, and you get spammed with whatever they choose to send you.

To suggest that employees MUSt be visiting unwelcome sites is pure BS. Most companies don’t give a damn if you visit TR on lunch or for research, problem solving etc. But THIS isnt a porn site.

Yes it IS, not CAN, but IS

In reply to Can porn spam be concidered Sexual Harassment to employees?

If your company’s email system is influxed with offesnive email, the company MUST take measures to reduce the amount of offensive email it receives or else you CAN sue them for exposing you to such content.

It’s not TECHNICALLY sexual harassment, but they must take measures to reduce the offensive emails you are subject to.

If they deploy a REASONABLE spam solution AND follow up with a company wide email explaining that they are taking measures but such content may still slip through th ecracks, they are okay.

If not, they are liable for it.

I have seen a company I worked for taken to court and forced to invest nearly $7,000.00 in a solution and i have seen another company actually get sued for 10’s of thousands (nearly the 100K mark, and another that acted accordingly, sent out a company wide email and addressed the issue BEFORE getting sued.

Of course it all depends on US state laws in your case, but in Canada, we must take preventative measures to stop offensive email from being received by employees.

yeb, in much country’s the same

In reply to Yes it IS, not CAN, but IS

Right you are Oz_Media.

As discussed in an other sub-thread within this thread. http://techrepublic.com.com/5208-6230-0.html?forumID=3&threadID=192859&messageID=1992042

Rob

Simple Changes

In reply to Yes it IS, not CAN, but IS

I’ve managed a team in this situation before. Working for an Internet company you get approx 80% SPAM to certain alias email addresses. The emails can be offensive even to broad minded people. A couple of simple suggestions that we implemented to reduce the concern were to:
1. turn off the preview window for email – reducing the possibility of the user seeing offencive pictures.
2. Turn off HTML in email – pictures are then not automatically viewed when opening emails.

Both simple but effective ways of reducing the shock IF the SPAM filtering fails remove the offending emails.

Agreed BUT…

In reply to Yes it IS, not CAN, but IS

“If your company’s email system is influxed with offesnive email, the company MUST take measures to reduce the amount of offensive email it receives or else you CAN sue them for exposing you to such content.”

Agreed, and is why my employer has been actively engaged in some kind of anti-spam for the past five years or so. Most of us here do not expect 100 percent spam removal; we simply need to be anxiously engaged in the cause.

But what’s on the table is a company that does not HAVE a mail system. Simply telling them to get a mail system seems irresponsible without further knowledge. They *might* consider subscribing to Postini (as an example) but they have to decide whether the cost is worth the benefit. Apparently, until this employee started complaining, services such as Postini would have been considered “all cost and no benefit.”

Just wondering

In reply to Yes it IS, not CAN, but IS

Do you also open your employees’ paper mail to make sure it doesn’t contain objectionable material?

Circumstantial Dependance

In reply to Can porn spam be concidered Sexual Harassment to employees?

If this is just Porn mail redirected to you to tick you off, or perhaps sent inadvertently to you instead of the intended address than this cannot be interpreted as an attack on you therefore you cannot claim harassment.
If however, it is Mailed directly to you from one person and you know that person then a harassment complaint might be in order.
It would have to continue on a regular basis for awhile so as to establish intent and motivation.
It could be sex mail, sent in the form of Hate Mail etc.
If this Mail is being directed to you personally, I would keep saving them up and when you have enough, register a formal complaint.
If that doesn’t do it, See a lawyer and have him/her act on your behalf.
Somebody is obviously dedicated to making you miserable.
Don’t let them win, bide your time, collect all the mail, [Make Hard Copies] and then if you are forced to act, you have the ammunition.
If your Bosses won’t take the initiative, your lawyer certainly will.
There might even be the possibility of a class action lawsuit.
If they are aimed directly at you, you are being harassed.
So be patient however be vigilant and build your case then see your lawyer.;)
Good Luck
Regards
Aaron 🙂

Depndance

In reply to Circumstantial Dependance

Not an issue in the case of spam. Your company HAS to take preventative measures to reduce or slow the amount of offensive mail you are subject to while using their equipment. It bears no difference whether the email is sent intentionally or directly to you from someone or not.

If you are offended by teh use of the company’s equipment, they must remove that offense. In th ecase of email spam it is known that most spam removal systems will not be 100% effective, though some are very close, therefore the company simply has to prove that they are doing everything within reason to control it.

Was not aware

In reply to Depndance

Thanks Oz, I was not aware of that aspect of it.
Appreciate the info
Regards
Aaron 🙂

How new is Relatively new?

In reply to Can porn spam be concidered Sexual Harassment to employees?

How did her email address get compromised already? Is she using an address that was already in place? Our policy here is that your corporate address is for corporate business ONLY. You may not use it for newsletters, subscriptions, private messages, or anything unrelated to official business. There are too many free services available for personal email already but DON’T USE YAHOO! That company is not filtering spam at all.

As far as Sexual Harassment, maybe not exactly but she could claim a hostile work environment.

3-4 months

In reply to How new is Relatively new?

She has been employeed here about 3-4 months. She has, by her choice, all previous employees e-mails coming to her. Some of the accounts are over seven years old. Some have been posted on the company website before too. Also have been used extensively for many-tens-of-thousands of customer corosponses, so who know who has the e-mail addresses by now.

Concidering the circumstances, I don’t think the ammount of spam is more than expected. I know this is a sensitive situation though and I want to make sure the company is protected.

on her part, also on…. Check this out, please!

In reply to 3-4 months

Keeping that e-mail address was on her part a smart business move (keeping continuity -no disrupion in comunication for the customer) is the problem. No-one can say for sure the culprit isn’t the one who just left. (just why did he leave? was angry? have a strange sense of humor?) One possible solution to that would involve a lot of work at time for both of you. But will pay off for your nerves, her piece of mind & productivity, and company profits. Here’s how: 1) set up a new e-mail address for her. 2) go over the contact list, determine valid contact e-mail (customers) 3)send an e-mail from both the old an new e-mail accounts explaining why. (in her new e-mail add. she will have a chance to intraduce her self, a sales pitch) 4)most of the nity-grity can be automated (even in Outlook Express & Word) 5)keep the old e-mail address active, but seperate it, it will unproductive now anyway. when something valid comes in from a customer who didn’t get the switch-over, fewer in time, forward it to her. after a while you’ll be able to delete the address altogether. Here’s the big pay off for you; you’ll be a hereo to her, & it helps when anyone in management is on your side, Top mangement will love that you provided a cost effective solution, & a way to increased productivity / business. And you get peace.!. 🙂

No Wonder!

In reply to 3-4 months

No wonder she is getting bombarded… she needs to dump those old accounts and get the important contacts moved over to her own account. Someone also needs to show her that if an address is made public on a website or discussion forum, spammers will compromise that address and no matter what filtering method is used, you are going to get something offensive in your mailbox. It is a really tough task to keep that stuff out completely, especially when the spammers and the users are both fighting you.

Have you tried

In reply to Can porn spam be concidered Sexual Harassment to employees?

brightmail or messagelabs? they eliminate most spam and viruses in email, can be used between any email source and email server. so you could use them with your current service or in house.

harassment: the person who sent the email is commtting the harassment. not your company. Of course they are unlikely to be caught. (tho state attorneys are shutting down many US based spammers, which are 40%)

Still you don’t want the horrid stuff, which would also be filled with phishing / keylogger installs, viruses

a few things…

In reply to Can porn spam be concidered Sexual Harassment to employees?

If she’s a new hire and is rocking the boat, can’t upper mgmt just let her go within 90 days of being hired for no reason whatsoever – seems like someone who is a new hire that makes this much noise over spam will probably make a whole lot more noise down the road over other things. Mgmt at my company is pretty quick to get the “assimilation” process working with new hires, you pretty much know who will last past the probationary period and who won’t. Granted this isn’t something that every company does but it can’t hurt to get upper mgmt involved so they are fully aware of what’s going on.

Spam tends to get attracted to addresses that get lent out to the general public, has she been handing out her email addy to people she shouldn’t be. Email addy’s can also be harvested using several techniques but I’m sure with a new employee and new email address, the way it got out was because of her own actions.

Something else to consider is this: Outlook Express is a free product, you can only do so much with it. However that isn’t the end of the road, you do have options: I think Cloudmark Spamnet from http://www.cloudmark.com offers a free trial product for Outlook Express, it’s called Cloudmark Desktop v2.9x, works with Outlook Express v5 or 6, among it’s benefits:
Installs quickly and requires no configuration,
No rules or lists to manage, blocks almost 100% of spam from reaching your inbox, blocks phishing emails to safeguard you against scams, etc. And no I don’t work for the company, I tried it out in the past just to see how it worked and it did ok for me, I’m sure it would work for you too, the product isn’t expensive either, you could always just purchase 1 license for her machine and if you think it’s worth, purchase more in the future for other users.

You will know after installing it how effective it is for this user’s mailbox. If they continue receiving porn spam you need to use a more powerful product (or maybe even change the email address altogether)

In any case, I wouldn’t sweat it. If you’re doing what you can with the limited resources you have available you can’t be held liable for the spam getting through, we all get spam, heck I can’t sue my employer for the spam that gets in my inbox, what are you worried about this new employee doing anyways – just because she’s a manager doesn’t mean she’ll get you turfed.

Tell her that instead of being part of the problem like complaining all the time, ask her to be part of the solution, she needs to be careful who she hands out this email address to, she needs to stop subscribing to every offer the internet provides her with and to ultimately keep that email address as private as she would an unlisted phone number.

Another thing you can try is start using Thunderbird email client on her desktop instead of Outlook Express. Download the latest version & install it on her desktop, it should automagically import her exist Outlook Express settings and setup with no problems. Thunderbird has a great reputation as an email client, and it has built in spam filters which catch alot of the junk emails before they end up in her inbox. This is a free solution and it wouldn’t be that hard to implement so what’s the harm in testing this out. You have nothing to lose except for alot of spam email.

I wouldn’t worry about false positives, the spam filter won’t delete any emails, it will just forward those emails that it flags as possible spam and throw them into a junk mail folder, you can review this regularly (or better yet, the new employee can) and make sure that any legitimate emails are being caught.

But seriously, get upper mgmt involved and have them speak with her and have them let her know that whatever can be done is being done. If they don’t like the situation as much as her, have them pony up the coin for some better software, free can only go so far especially when you’re not even running your mail server and the service is provided by an ISP, place some responsibility on them for this.

… just my 0.02 cents, feel free to agree or disagree.

check out SpamFighter’s website ….

In reply to Can porn spam be concidered Sexual Harassment to employees?

http://www.spamfighter.com/Product_Info.asp

Free Spam Filter for Outlook and Outlook Express
SPAMfighter has partnered up with Microsoft to build the strongest, safest and most effective anti spam tool on the market. So if you use Outlook or Outlook Express and you want to get rid of spam, just install SPAMfighter. And if you use it at home, it’s 100% free.

SPAMfighter Standard is 100% free for private use
Award winning spam blocking technology
Protects against “phishing”, identity theft and other email fraud
Used by more than one million happy users around the World
Protects all the email accounts on your PC
Unique language filtering tool that empowers you to stop emails written in specific languages
Automatic “real mail” protection – means no lost business mails!
Blacklist domains and emails
Spam Abuse Reporting with one click
Automatic Whitelist management
Privacy Guaranteed – we don’t see any of your email
Does not filter based on simple phrases or “trigger” words. Allows any content
Language support: English, German, Spanish, Chinese, French, Italian, Greek, Dutch, Swedish, Norwegian, Suomi and Danish.
SPAMfighter requires:
Operating System Windows XP, Windows 2000, Windows 98 or Windows ME
Email client Microsoft Outlook or Outlook Express
Memory 64 MB minimum
Disk Space 10 MB

There are two versions of SPAMfighter:

SPAMfighter Pro: This is the product you download and get free for 1 month. After the trial, you can choose to pay only $29 and keep the Pro version, otherwise you are automatically downgraded to the free SPAMfighter Standard.
SPAMfighter Pro can be used in companies and other commercial environments and gives access to better protection.

SPAMfighter Standard: Is free and can only be used in private homes and schools (you can try it out at least and then determine whether or not it’s worth keeping and purchasing). In SPAMfighter Standard, a short text ad is displayed in your e-mail client, and an “I’m protected by SPAMfighter” message is appended to your outgoing e-mails. You don’t have the language filter and other useful features are missing.

Found this info on SpamFighter on http://www.download.com – no I don’t work for this company, did a search on SPAM and got plenty of results, lots of products to try out that are free or offer trial periods to test out the product before you buy. This one caught my eye because of the word “FREE”.

The way I see it, it can’t hurt to try out this product, it’s free, all that’s required is the time to install & configure it on that specific user’s machine – if it works then you know it’s something you can begin to rollout to the rest of your company workstations that use Outlook Express.

Try it out let me know how it works out for you.

No Opinion

In reply to Can porn spam be concidered Sexual Harassment to employees?

I didn’t even bother reading any of the replies to this question. No one here (unless I am mistaken) has any business answering this question. The only ones you should be relying on for an opinion are your companies attorney and the EEOC. If someone here is an attorney for your jurisdiction who has knowledge or experience with this area of law, then comment away. Otherwise, you need to not listen to us and consult the people who are actually qualified to answer your questions.

MF

Personally, I think she should get the stick out of her ass and get over it, but I doubt you will be able to use me as an expert witness in court. Or anyone else here.

No fun for you, come back one year!

In reply to No Opinion

If you HAD read the replies, you would see that most of the replies are not about the actual situation at hand, but rather a lively discussion of spam control on a somewhat theoretical level.

Also, you err in placing too much emphasis on just one person’s opinion (lawyers opinions are, well, opinions) and the EEOC. The “law” is what a judge and jury say it is; and that’s a moving target, and we all know it. A lawyer’s opinion exists so that you have someone to blame when it goes sour, but in defense of the legal industry, they exist to improve the “odds” of getting it right.

In sexual harassment, there is no “safe harbor.” That “hostile workplace” we’ve been discussing can be just about ANYTHING.

What I am learning about Canada is that workers have even more power than in the states to wag the dog.

Show willing – take it seriously

In reply to Can porn spam be concidered Sexual Harassment to employees?

She would have a case if the company hasn’t taken “reasonable” steps. It is unpleasant and it isn’t actually difficult to do something about. There are both free and low cost anti-spam programs. It would help productivity as well.
She obviously has complained before and had no response – by doing this she has at least got someone to take it seriously – and there is an obligation, both legal and moral, to do something about it.

Good luck

Try Microsoft Outlook 2003

In reply to Can porn spam be concidered Sexual Harassment to employees?

Outlook 2003 has a built in junk mail filter that works fairly well. It may not stop all of the spam but it does cut down on the volume. You can also set your own rules in it.

apparently they don’t have funds for this type of purchase..

In reply to Try Microsoft Outlook 2003

which is why they’re using Outlook Express instead of Outlook 2003, I agree Outlook 2003 has a decent junk mail filter, I use it myself and it catch’s most spam mail, plus any spam that does get through to my inbox can be flagged as junk mail so that the same email won’t come through twice. Also M$ provides regular (monthly) updates to their Junk Email filter via the office update site.

Unfortunately if this user’s company doesn’t have financial resources to purchase copies of this Office 2003 or Outlook 2003 alone, he’s left with only freeware/shareware options.

Best effort

In reply to Can porn spam be concidered Sexual Harassment to employees?

She has taken the first step in the procedure to alert management this is offensive to her. The next step is to educate her that short of eliminating her internet e-mail address, spam can happen, and educate her on how she uses her internet address. I would immediately change her internet address, instruct her to not register that address with any web site and use that address for business purposes only. This will show the employee the company has responded to her inquiry. Since the spam is not spawned internally, I do not believe she would have much of a case.

Find a host with Spam Assassin

In reply to Can porn spam be concidered Sexual Harassment to employees?

We had a horrible problem with this issue. Yes, we had a disgruntled employee making similar statements.

We’re an employment agency. Believe me, we depend on minute to minute email contact, with clients, candidates, and among our employees.

New web host. They offer Spam Assassin. I have the “spam limit” set to a very aggressive 3.8. I’ve had to “white list” some clients and so on, but our spam is down from hundreds a day to dozens a week (except for someone who signed up for “free offers”).

I’ll be glad to reply off board as to the web host we use. I also use them for 5 or 6 of my personal business sites.

Sincerely,

Jon Williamson IT Manager, Webmaster, Recruiter/Recruiter Training

Williamson Employment Services, Inc.
213 Hilltop Rd.
St. Joseph, MI 49085

Are you LinkedIn? If so, send a connection request! If not, visit my profile at http://www.linkedin.com/pub/0/1b2/a68 for information.

Visit our jobs page at http://www.williamsonemployment.com/jobs.html

Phone: 269-983-0142 or 800-226-6801
Fax: 269-983-8955
Cell Phone: 269-325-5559
Home Office: 269-353-4735
Skype: williamson_jon
Gtalk: williamsonjon
MSN: williamson_jon@hotmail.com

Need some statistics

In reply to Can porn spam be concidered Sexual Harassment to employees?

This manger person has directed you to forward to her all former employees’ email. Additionally, you cannot filter, by management (hers?) direction any email addresses used for taking orders.

You state that she gets 2 or 3 messages (per day?) of sexually explicit spam.

First, change the viewer of the message so it isn’t HTML. That should remove some of the images with which she has issue.

Next, please get a list of how many messages this person receives, and compare it to how many messages are “undesireable”. That ratio is important.

Next, see which of the email addresses tend to have only spam. Perhaps you can eliminate those addresses, with a reply-to saying that this is no longer an active account.. ple4ase use whatever other account you have, yadda yadda…

Try to eliminate taking orders by email. Make it a web form, and those number-to-image keys work well to verify human interaction. (Alternatively, use extranet technologies to make sure your regular big customers get a better experience.)

I’d be interrested in seeing the numbers, myself.

Why !

In reply to Can porn spam be concidered Sexual Harassment to employees?

I have not read all the posts, so sorry if I’m repeating someone else comments but if the person had the preview turned off in their email client then they would not see the email.

Although hard to stop on a low budget, if you turn off the preview in their email all they have to do is right click the line in the inbox and delete them without reading them, if they read them than that’s their fault and should be against company email policy anyway.

It’s counter productive no matter what

In reply to Can porn spam be concidered Sexual Harassment to employees?

I do not know if its legaly considered harrassment due to it not orgionating from inhouse, but it definatly is counter productive.
Look at it this way, how many important e-mails are being deleted by accident because so many people have to dig through the porn spam? They are offended by it, so do not open the e-mail to insure it is not porn spam?
I read an article where a very large percentage of the email spam origionates from China and Korea. If you have no buisness dealings with those two nations. Lol, firewall them. Bet your porn spam goes down right away just doing that. I know that my home unix machine receives alot of ssh brute force attacks from there. Actualy, 8 out of 10 come from those two countries. I’ve firewalled them.
Also, if you are of limited resources. Look at this:
http://www.personalinformationorganizer.com/download/cloud_spam/
That is a free spam filter for outlook express. It works off the contributions of everyone who use’s it, which builds a blacklist of offending parties. I haven’t used this in a couple years, because I have switched all my e-mail over to gmail and I let them deal with the spam issue. But, I was using this for personal use when all I was receiving was spam. It helped alot, and I beleive it directs all of what it tag’s as spam into a spam folder. So, you shouldn’t lose any e-mails if something is improperly identified.
Norton’s suite has spam filters also, if I rember correctly.
droolin

Wa Wa Wa

In reply to Can porn spam be concidered Sexual Harassment to employees?

I am SO sick of whiny freakin’ people, that when people have a legitimate gripe, I barely listen.
Fire the bitch. She will just be trouble down the road, I will bet on it. If this is a relatively NEW employee and they are already whining about sexual harassment, save yourself some headaches, cut her loose now. Before your company has to pick up her unemployment compensation.

depends upon the local laws

In reply to Can porn spam be concidered Sexual Harassment to employees?

Here in Australia porn spam meets prima facie requirements for sexual harassment but you would find it impossible to make a conviction. Most of the laws are written such that a conviction is only really possible if the harasser continues AFTER being told to stop by the victim and the management can only be hit if they do not take reasonable steps to stop it. No requirement to make the harassment impossible as it is recognised you cannot do that.

In the case of porn spam the victim would have to find the spammer and tell them to stop. then if the spammer is not an employee of the company you would have further difficulties.

In a case like this is should be easy for the employee to simply not open mail from unknown addresses. The matter now comes down to how much Internet access does the employee need to do their job.

I have seen one case of something similar in Australia and the company resolved the issue by instituting a filter on that person’s mail box and computer that restricted all mail contacts to within the company – no ability to send or receive from outside. And they had no Internet access at all, the browser would only access the corporate Intranet site for corporate stuff. that person did not need to contact anyone outside at all, system was fine tuned to make it so.

porn and the law

In reply to Can porn spam be concidered Sexual Harassment to employees?

I hate spam e-mail. I hate porn. I dislike new employees griping about something as if it is only happening to them. Have her secretary or admin assistant filter her email and be sure it is not internal email. That should be stopped immediately.

Well what has happened since 4/5/06

In reply to Can porn spam be concidered Sexual Harassment to employees?

You started this discussion 5 days ago, you’ve obviously heard enough from all of us who have participated in this query of yours to get started in a few directions.

I am very interested (you know I mean business when I started boldfacing words) to hear what you have tried out to help stop the spam from getting in this user’s mailbox.

Have you tried installing some free software, or temporarily changing the email client, or have you spoken with mgmt to see what kind of support you can get, have you spoken with this employee to let her know that she has your support?

Please reply back when you have time and let us know what you’ve done thus far.

yea, Im curious too

In reply to Well what has happened since 4/5/06

Like bob said, Im curious how you have followed up on this too. There have been several sugestions that have been put forward that would you could do, even if you do have a limited budget. This would give you the we are trying to stop the spam with our limited resources argument. Hopefully, someone has followed up with the employee. It might be your place, but it’s someones place to follow up with her. Id love to know her reaction if you are putting in place some spam blockers. If she really is a gold digger, or if this is all that she was after.
Lol, shoot. Worse case, use gmail. They have spam blockers. And it’s free. Shoot, if nobody else will. Ill send an invitation so she can have it.

droolin

Action

In reply to Well what has happened since 4/5/06

Early on in the discussion we made the decision to upgrade the sales departments e-mail client to Outlook 2003. We are going to try this out to see if it minimizes the spam to an acceptable level. In the meantime I have implimented Cloudmark antispam for Outlook Express. We are just using the free trial period to get us through until we receive the Outlook upgrdes and it seems to be doing a great job.

The employee seems pacified now ? it?s obvious that we are trying to accommodate her needs for a comfortable work environment. Although it must be noted that, for now at least, someone still has to monitor the spam folder for false possitives. Since this can?t be me all the time, the sale people are still looking at all of the spam.

Late to the Party…

In reply to Action

I’m late to the discussion, and have searched through part of the discussion, but I am really curious if her address was pre-existing and she inherited it (ie. sales@yourcompany.com) or was it setup fresh? If it’s an older address that you can’t change, you’ll need to implement some client-side filtering, but if it’s a new address, I would beleive it’s her problem as an address doesn’t get out without the user’s participation (email forwards, signing up for every site on the web, etc.) in which case she needs to be sent to a technology education class.

Give in to a child

In reply to Action

Grrrrrrreat solution. Well the spam filter was a no brainer. However because the little whinney baby does not like to see that icky porn, some poor wretch has nothing to do all day but wade through a ton of nonsense, to pick out the few grains of legitimate mail. What a marvelous waste of a perfectly good employee. I am sure that person just looooves the new duties that was foisted upon them to appease the diva. You say she seems pacified…..for now, until the drama queen finds something else to get her undies in a bundle about. Rest assured, she will.

For a While

In reply to Give in to a child

From what I have seen throughout this ordeal, they could use this as the beggining of a great project. That person who has to go through all this rigamoro[Spelling?]could create the standard for spam controls. Spam is considered by us as just a hastle, but for many companies it is a drain on their pocketbooks.

As for the whiny little baby, hey she may be a great person with no other problems. This whole thing may have been a huge misunderstanding. But, sadly, you are probably right.

Want an easy fix to your problem?

In reply to Can porn spam be concidered Sexual Harassment to employees?

Hey, avoid all the legal hassles – I use this solution for all of my very small business customers.
Mozilla’s Thunderbird email client has very good spam/junk mail filtering – it flat out works, and it’s a free download.
Go to http://www.mozilla.com, download Thunderbird email client, install on each workstation [about 5 minutes each tops!], it will find your Outlook Express email settings & messages and import them for you, folders, messages-everything [you might have to import your address books, but that’s simplicity]. In Thunderbird, click on “Tools / Junk Mail Controls” and configure them for each address book you may be using. Click on “Tools / Run Junk Mail Controls on Folder”. It will create a “Junk” folder for each user, and if you create a simple rule [on the same “Tools” menu] to filter all your incoming customer orders automatically to a special folder, you will never loose any. In addition you can specify that all junk be held on your system for weeks if you like, just for insurance against the unusual message that might get missed and end up in the junk folder. It flat out works, and takes almost no time to setup.

This has to be the best reply yet

In reply to Want an easy fix to your problem?

I am using Thunderbird, and I’ve never set up the spam filter on it. I like it a whole lot better then outlook express, and you just gave me a reason to like it more. Shoot, I don’t even have outlook express installed anymore. I deleted it off completely. If I thought I could delete explorer, I would. I like FireFox better then bloody Explorer too.
I know that was off topic, but I still appriceated the info.

droolin

Reasonable efforts come into play

In reply to This has to be the best reply yet

If I am not mistaken, much of the issue surrounds “reasonable atempts” at blocking the offensive material by the company. The onus of responsibility for a safe and non-hostile, comfortable work environment does indeed fall on the company. The company should be able to set up some sort of software and hardware based spam filtering. Yes, it is an expense for the compnay, but this exepnse is recapturable as a business expense come tax time. Once the mail is filtered, and the company maintains the filtering mechanism with updates, then the company has met it’s requirement of making a reasonable effort to block the offensive material, even if all email is not filtered. Another issue for companies is lost revenue and profits from erroneously blocked email. As part of the company’s email protocol, a person or group of people could possibly spot screen emails for this, but this would be another (and possible quite large expense for the company), but let’s face, some emails will be missed or lost. However, the expenses from law suits due to not making a reasonable effort to block the offensive material are much greater.

Also, once the reasonable effort to block the offensive material has been made, the female employee and others need to be educated about the new email filtering program and policies. I am of the opinion (I am not a lawyer) that once the reasonable effort has been made, then the employees do not have a basis for a harrassment suit. Just my $.02 worth. PS- this is my first post here.

80 Percent False Positives

In reply to Reasonable efforts come into play

As an interesting side story, our anti-spam has a false positive rate of about 80 percent but only for a business unit doing housing rehabilitation. It seems that very few people in that industry can spell and they use worm-ridden PC’s and Hotmail accounts that produce email looking like spam.

Because of this, we have made things WORSE for that business unit — instead of one spam-laden “inbox” to read throughout the day, they must now read the inbox and the spam quarantine every day.

Business cannot lose email. Unwanted spam can cost $100,000 (says Oz_Media), but a lost email can cost hundreds of millions of dollars.

JAFO

In reply to Want an easy fix to your problem?

Put up Thunderbird behind a Kerio email server running on SuSE Linux 10.0 and you have a very good little email system. I support seven email domains of mixed ?stuff? and this hasty quick fix on a site to replace an Exchange server that was coming apart has turned out to be a great combo.

The client does not want Exchange back. No problem I’ll use it somewhere else. Kerio email server seems to be a good little product. It’s Outlook connector works great and it allows you to do many custom things to prevent incoming spam including setting up TCP/IP address blacklist subscriptions and to add your own blacklists. The Web connector is excellent. Scalix on Linux is good stuff too but cost much more.

I’ll stop now. I was starting to sound like an advertisement.

?Reasonable effort? by a company and all of its varied interpretations will make a legal case like sexual harassment from porn mail a crap shoot anyway you look at it.

One way to make things clear: signed agreement before turning on filtering

In reply to Can porn spam be concidered Sexual Harassment to employees?

I agree with the people who say that it is best to use available software or blocking options to make it clear that the company cares about fixing the problem– but also sympathize with people who are tired of having a big part of their IT jobs be protecting employees from the Internet, especially when so many employees end up getting more spam by doing things that bring it on themselves (e.g. publishing their plaintext e-mail on the net, attempting to download “cute” programs that are really spyware, etc.). Some days I feel like the well-meaning-but-often-ignorant users of my own network are enough work and I’d rather not have to deal with protecting them from all the unscrupulous characters on the net as well.

What I did with regards to spam was to install RBL-type blocking software that inserted “this is possibly spam” type headers into messages, and then I can turn on the blocking for individual users if they request it (therefore I do not have to worry about most of the users losing real mail to false-positives). I also had strict Group Policies to prevent the installation of any spyware, basically reducing my spyware problem to zero. Then, whenever anybody requested spam blocking, I made them sign a one-page document explaining what spam blocking is, that no computer program can be 100% effective, that they can reduce their spam by not publishing their e-mail address or signing up for “deals” on the net, and that they have to check their spam filter for false positives every week or so. After they sign that, I turn on their filter.

I added the signed document step because many of my users expected that every single message will be filtered out, and none of their legitimate mail would be put in the spam folder (so they didn’t check the spam folder and then got mad at IT if they missed an important message). My document stated up-front that the only way to ensure this 100% level of accuracy is to hire a human admin assistant to screen your mail, and then they understood that we don’t have that kind of money or time. (Of course, by buying the latest products I could probably INCREASE my accuracy, but my experience has been that certain users will expect 100% accuracy, not 95% or 90%, and they will expect this despite not being conscious about where they share their e-mail addresses on the internet, so the advantages of a signed agreement still exist.)

Dave

Not exactly harassment

In reply to Can porn spam be concidered Sexual Harassment to employees?

the employee can say that they are being made to work in hostile work environment. Not quite sexual harassment but in the end it will amount to the same thing, money out of your pockets.

No more responsible than the Postal Carrier is …

In reply to Can porn spam be concidered Sexual Harassment to employees?

for delivering offensive mail.

The employee in question obviously has unrealistic expectations of life, and is all too quick to expect others to take responsibility for protecting her from its ugly warts.

ANYTHING is possible.

In reply to Can porn spam be concidered Sexual Harassment to employees?

Beware anyone saying flat “yes” or “no”. The law is whatever a judge and jury says it is.

A slightly longer answer is that the offended employee can certainly sue; and the employer can certainly defend. Risk factors include whether the company utilized common and reasonable preventive measures. If the employer failed to use any measures at all, I would say that a risk exists, probably greater risk in liberal New England states where employers are considered somewhat “in loco parentis”, ie, your parents, responsible for feeding you, sheltering you from rain, snow, porn and poverty. Out west, juries are more likely to have a libertarian point of view that you can do whatever you want, but so can anyone else and you accept as a condition of employment the fact that you might not like your next door neighbor or the email you get.

It is the nature of BUSINESS to receive unsolicited mail. Think about it — if a business cannot contact a client by email until a business relationship is established, and the client cannot contact the business for the same reason, how then shall that business relationship become established?

The answer is that the business must accept the initial (and hence unsolicited) contact necessary to create the business relationship.

Fail to see the Culpability

In reply to ANYTHING is possible.

Several factors that pop to mind:

First, was this e-mail address inherited from a previous employee (ie. accounting@thiscompany.com). If so, either a address change is warranted (costly in both $ and lost contacts).

Second, if the address is NEW then it is her own fault for being so liberal about giving out that e-mail address either by forwarding lame chain e-mails and jokes or signing up for every website she comes across using the business email addy.

Third, the company should have some spam/virus filtering in place either by IT or by their ISP, however this is impossible to make 100% bulletproof and still allow her to not have legit emails blocked.

Basically, if it’s a old address, the company needs to make the effort to swap her to a new addy to shut her up or if it’s a new address, she needs to go to through some very thorough technology training and the do’s and don’ts of e-mail addresses.

Yes, it is an inherited email address

In reply to Fail to see the Culpability

In case the original author doesn’t respond, I will — the address generating the spam has been in use for many years (7 or 8) and is wanted to continue.

Culpability is what lawyers create in the minds of a jury. If the laywer succeeds, a new crime will have been created out of thin air, ex-nihilo.

A distantly related situation — I am employed in the multi-family housing industry (apartments). About 10 years ago someone discovered a whole realm of legal action possibilities — mold. It is EVERYWHERE. All you have to do is declare yourself offended, the Landlord must remedy the offense — so says Oz_Media and he’s not far wrong. Just read “el reg” (The Register, http://www.theregister.co.uk) for bizarre stories from all of the Queen’s former colonies and the homeland itself.

But as we have seen with Patent trolling, even more money can be made by NOT complaining in a timely manner and wait for DAMAGES to accumulate.

Hrm…

In reply to Yes, it is an inherited email address

Well, maybe I should have used “liability”… too much Law & Order I guess 😀

It being an inherited e-mail addy is tricky, especially one entrenched over such a long period. It seems he has taken the best route which is client-side filtering, however this brings up a very interesting issue alltogether. If a company takes sufficient measures to stop the spam, they should not be held liable for this. Spam is so agressive that even the best filters can’t catch it all. I work at an ISP and we spend a good chunk of change keeping our filter servers updated but they still get through. IMHO someone just needs to slap this lady with a big ass reality stick… either you get all your sales emails with some porn spam or you risk loosing some potential sales because you can’t act like an adult and ignore things that offend you.

While on one hand, I’d love to see this go to court so she could be made a fool of, I know the legal system here and just because it’s porn the court would side with her…. le sigh…

spam-sexual harrassment????

In reply to Can porn spam be concidered Sexual Harassment to employees?

This woman is a lawsuit waiting to happen. If she cannot utilize this contrivance to file a harrassment lawsuit she will find another. You can always find people who love to play the victim and can feel offended in the most innocuous of circumstance. Woebetide this company that keeps her. If there is the usual periodic adult banter in this office as there is in any office of people that get along well, she will be the skunk at the garden party.
It goes without saying that porn spam, like any other spam is the scourge of the internet. Despite the greatest of effort, some will get through. No company wants this sort of thing and makes every effort to thwart it. It is a most obnoxious time waster for the sheer fact that people have to take time to delete spam from their inboxes. There are some annoyances in life that one has to live with. As an aside, this company should make a greater effort to limit spam of for no other reason is that it is counterproductive to office efficiency. Suing for harrassment in this case is like a construction worker suing for tired muscles.

This needs a lawyers attention + Some Lovin

In reply to Can porn spam be concidered Sexual Harassment to employees?

I am not a lawyer but I have read nearly every reply here. As Someone has already said, this is a question for you company’s lawyer.

As far as the manager goes, she may be trouble. Or maybe she WAS looking out for the company and her language was to say that someone else might consider it sexual harassment. I am sorry to say that she is probably trouble. But it really only takes a little bit of work to turn her around. Give her a little bit of attention by helping her with this problem and make her a part of the solution. Train her in the use of email use and spam filtering, then put her on the team to fix the problem company wide. And please explain to her that even with the best filtering it will be impossible to prevent every spam and scam out there. Hope it all works out!!!

-Jamas

Don’t think so

In reply to Can porn spam be concidered Sexual Harassment to employees?

But to end it. Go to her outlook settings go to rules and make a rule that when a subject has the word “spam” in it, send that email to trash. Also I am a Systems Analyst with The HR Div and asked big boss and he doesn’t believe so becuase she reported it, you explained the IT end to her and I am assuming that she isn’t stupid enough to open the email, so the only thing she actually sees is subject: Spam “Porn” content or spam “Vulger word” content. She must get tons on her home computer so who is she sending (kinda) threatening emails to about being hassased at home?

How can nearly ALL of you miss the obvious???!!!

In reply to Can porn spam be concidered Sexual Harassment to employees?

First:
Implement a Network use policy that CLEARLY states that while the company shall make “Reasonable efforts” to curtail “unwanted mails of a solicitous, nuisance and or suggestive, lewd, or obscene, natures” and that the employee agrees that the company shall be “held blameless and immune to litigation arising from or relating to said offensive or intrusive items” received by employee while working on behalf of company.
Require the agreement to be signed before the employee is granted access to the network. If they refuse to sign it, fire them and hire someone with a clue. It is NOT discriminatory, and as stated previously, most US states are “right to work” states and employees can be let go at any time for non-discriminatory reasons, which do not have to even be divulged…

… And MOVE ON. I am amazed how much traffic this non-event is generating.

the obvious ..

In reply to How can nearly ALL of you miss the obvious???!!!

Whilst employers need to ensure the workplace is a safe and non threatening work environment (at least here in Australia), they cannot be held liable for every possible eventuality.

Following from Bill’s post, if there is a reasonable effort to remove offensive material (electronic and otherwise), as long as it is sufficient to hold up in court, then no problem.

define something that ‘holds up’…

In reply to the obvious ..

What holds water?

Just implementing some free spam solution like SpamBays (sp?), SpamAssassin, etc? Hiring someone JUST to go through her mail? Hiring several people to go through and forward EVERYone’s mail, except these have signed contracts stating that this is their job and they’re okay with that? Maybe a total e-mail server software replacement? There were many suggestions tossed around here. Some more expensive than others.

Without defining what “reasonable” means to one of many judges, yet preferably cost effective and acceptable for the company… You might as well have asked someone to jump. And when they ask how high, you respond, “high enough for that person over there.”

You totally missed it?

In reply to define something that ‘holds up’…

SIGN ZEE PAPERS!!!
A network use policy and agreement to hold the company blameless while using their systems does hold up in court, and always has.
DO THE PAPERWORK RIGHT.

ALWAYS HAS???

In reply to You totally missed it?

I agree that this is a needed step in the process, however a piece of paper signed by her is not a magic bullet. A contract signed by two private parties does NOT change the LAW. If a judge thinks that this case meets the requirements for sexual harassment that piece of paper may as well be on a roll next to the toilet. In fact any time an item enters the court room all bets are off, the judge or jury could go any way they feel, even with total disregard for the law. This actually happens enough that most suits are settled outside court.

With that said, they need to get that piece of paper created and signed by every employee in the company. And just as Bill stated, do it right and do it fast. These matters should always be done with a lawyer. A good lawyer is worth their weight in gold, at least to a business.
-Jamas

Thank-you jamas

In reply to ALWAYS HAS???

> “I agree that this is a needed step in the process, however a piece of paper signed by her is not a magic bullet.”

I agree. Especially since this is after she has already created the problem. The judge/jury may decide that the paper was signed under pressure of loosing her job, making the contract null and void. As opposed to signing it beforehand. (Which they can still make null and void, but a bit harder, as the knee-jerk reaction would potentially be: “well they warned you!”.) It would potentially help the case, but it could also give a false sense of security.

A pity you’re not anywhere near NYC, or I’d say use us! (I am an IT Manager (mostly sys admin/tech support duties tho…) for a law firm.) We do have specialties in both “employment” and “employment benefits” areas. One of the attorneys actually does some companies in Holland… But I’m not sure where you hail from, as TR doesn’t say. (However I myself am not now, nor ever will be, a lawyer. Thus do not give advice on legal topics. :p)

Where does he live?

In reply to How can nearly ALL of you miss the obvious???!!!

His profile says “Not specified” as a country. Meaning he either didn’t specify (can you register without specifying?) or he’s not in the US or Canada. Does it then matter what most US states are?

If you are basing assumptions on this, you should know that different countries have different ways of doing things.

SPAM filter from the Manager’s budget

In reply to Can porn spam be concidered Sexual Harassment to employees?

I agree with those that say the company is probably making its best effort and this is a nonevent that can’t be successfully litigated.

I would seriously question the need for this manager if the person is going to get all hyper about something everyone deals with every day.

I would give the manager the choice. You can live with the inconveninece, or the spam filter is coming out of your budget. Take your pick.

Sexual Harrassment? Sure. Company liable? Definitely not.

In reply to Can porn spam be concidered Sexual Harassment to employees?

I feel pretty comfortable saying that unsolicited pornographic e-mail can definitely be viewed as sexual harassment. Is the company to blame or liable for the end user receiving it? Surely not. It was noted that the company is doing what it can with a hosted mail system, limited resources, and a reliance on an e-mail-based ordering system. That shows that the company is making a good faith effort to block as much spam as it can, whether it contain mortgage sales pitches, prescription drug sales pitches, or porn.

In my opinion, the company has a couple of options:
-Take the mail system internal; use the mail server?s rules to filter out undesirable messages, and couple that with a good content filtering appliance (my company has had great success with Barracuda). Once you bring the new mail system online, upgrade your mail clients from Outlook Express to Outlook or another, more robust mail client. There are a lot of options out there covering the whole range of pricing from Exchange/Outlook and Domino/Notes on the pricier side, or a whole host of solid open-source projects.
-Make the move to an online ordering system. Even if you don?t have the orders dumping directly into your purchasing system, you would at least be able to set up an ordering web form that would e-mail the order to your company with a single e-mail address or subject line. That would allow you to set up better filtering regardless of whether your mail system is hosted or internal.

Best of luck to you!

Liability…of course.

In reply to Sexual Harrassment? Sure. Company liable? Definitely not.

Your company must assume some responsibility for all electronic tranactions. And must prove (due diligence) in eliminating what it considers violations to it’s policies.

If your company doesn’t have an internet\email policy this would be a good time to create one. This would show that IT\Management is moving in the right direction.

Remember, you must prove you’re doing everything possible to eliminate this matter or else the buck$$ stops here.

Liability…of course.

In reply to Sexual Harrassment? Sure. Company liable? Definitely not.

Your company must assume some responsibility for all electronic tranactions. And must prove (due diligence) in eliminating what it considers violations to it’s policies.

If your company doesn’t have an internet\email policy this would be a good time to create one. This would show that IT\Management is moving in the right direction.

Remember, you must prove you’re doing everything possible to eliminate this matter or else the buck$$ stops here.

What planet is this person from???

In reply to Can porn spam be concidered Sexual Harassment to employees?

If she did sue, how about having her arrested for filing a false police report!

What is “false” about it?

In reply to What planet is this person from???

She is being harrassed by sexually explicit e-mails… As long as she says this, what is “false” about it?

Two suggestions for you

In reply to Can porn spam be concidered Sexual Harassment to employees?

I’m a female who gets alot of sex spam at work. I have a ISP-based spam filter and I bought MailWasher Pro for my desktop. MailWasher Pro is good at filtering out spam. You might want to consider trying that out on the employee’s desktop.

Second, what if you put in your employee manual that spam of any kind (sexual, drug, etc.) may be sent to an employee’s email. It is their duty to thoroughly scrutinze all email headers and to not look at and immediately delete any ones the employee deems to be spam (or maybe forward to a company email address and have someone who doesn’t mind the occasion “off-color” spam.

Lorane

Send a note to your manager with cc to the lady

In reply to Can porn spam be concidered Sexual Harassment to employees?

You have to send a note to your manager advising him/her of the problem and also cc it to the lady. It is not your responsibility to worry of this is harrasment. If the lady talks to you tell her to talk to her own supervisor since you have done your best. (Personally she sounds like a bully but under no circumstances tell her that or speak to her in a bad way.) Politely and calmly tell her you have done your best, you understand her but there is nothing more that you can do about it. If she insists politely tell her that you have nothing more to say about it. After she has talked to you send another note to your supervisor saying what you did and said.

(Remember some people use words like “harassment” very easily. Don’t worry.)

Do your best.

In reply to Send a note to your manager with cc to the lady

Think of this as an opportunity. Do your best with this because it will benefit the rest of the company and increase productivity for others and put another feather in your cap. (Also listen to the female posters in this list.) If you have done your best then you have no worries.

Call it “stalking” not harassment.

In reply to Can porn spam be concidered Sexual Harassment to employees?

Unless the email is from within the company, her complaint is really against the person who sent it originally. The Department of Transportation is not responsible for every car on the road, and the Postal Service was not held responsible for the letters it delivered a couple years ago to some Senators, which turned out to contain anthrax. For the same reason, you should not be blamed, as caretaker of the [i]infrastructure[/i] which was misused to send those messages to your new employee. I think that all “Internet crime” should be prosecuted according to the same laws that govern human interactions already, and that unsolicited porn emails should be classified as “stalking”.

I have a Better Question!!! Can the Company Promoted in the Spam Be heald R

In reply to Can porn spam be concidered Sexual Harassment to employees?

Forget the company you work for. I want to know about the Medical companies sending all these Viagra Spam emails talking about “Making her scream” I am getting constant Sexual Harassment emails about my Penis size and I think it is discusting. What is most discusting is they have no idea my age, How do they know I am not a child? But even as an adult I do not think it is ok for anyone to constantly sexually harass me for any reason. Yet every single day of my life my personal email is full of spam emails asking about the size of my penis. I want that to stop. Nobody has any right to send me any sexual explicit emails. So I could care less if my employer could be heald responsible for sexual harassment what matters more is can we take up legal action against the company promoted in the sexual explicit spam we recieve??

I sure would love to see a class action suite against these pharmaceutical companies that are responsible for who ever sent these Sexual Harassing Emails!! I would join that suite in a heart beat and I may be the first person to file a lawsuite against pharmaceutical companies for sexual harassing emails. I do NOT need any Viagra and I sure as hell do not want a million emails about it.

I want to see the People of the USA stand the hell up and take legal action against these pharmaceutical companies that think they can do what ever they want!!

[Author]

Replies