Crazy email filtering

PC 200” posted a blog entry about their force’s email filtering system which made me laugh enough to want to mention it here.

They block inbound attachments, which could be a pain, but is sensible enough.

However, they also block “bad” language (as I’m sure the police don’t get subjected to foul language often, and their poor, delicate sensitivities would be mortally offended by it….) – but then send you an email to report that an inbound mail was blocked, describing why:

You’ll get an email which says something along the lines of “you have been sent an email containing offensive or inappropriate language. The language contained is of a value of 60 points. The word was either one of the following or a derivative of: fuck, fucking, fuckers, mother-fucker, fuck-off”.

So, they’ll block the email containing the word that might offend you, then send you an email containing that word and many other alternatives of it!

And the other thing which intrigues me, is that somewhere in the Home Office a committee has sat around a table wondering how many points to give swear words. You can imagine it. A whole afternoon, or more, debating how many points to give ‘bollocks’. “OK, we’ll give ‘bollocks’ 50 points, agreed?” “No, if we give ‘bollocks’ 50 then we have to give ‘arsehole’ 65, surely”, “Yes, but if we give ‘arsehole’ 65 then we have to reduce ‘wanker’ to 63.” “OK, let’s give ‘bollocks’ 45.” “No we can’t do that because ‘balls’ is 45.”

I’ve been reading his blog "200 Weeks" for a while now, well worth a read.

One thought on “Crazy email filtering”

  1. When I used to work in a call center they started logging sites staff visited than created a weekly report sent to everyone.
    One poor girl was always at the top of the Offensive sites list as she was from Essex and many of the local site she visited had Essex in the domain.
    Number of SEX sites visited in a week : 97

Comments are closed.