Spam eats up time at the office
A colleague forwarded me an e-mail from a friend of a friend. What's up with this? he asked. The e-mail was a chain letter about breast-cancer funding, sent from the sender's work e-mail and forwarded to many other people's work e-mail. At the bottom of the letter, the corporate legalese stated: This message contains information from (insert unwitting company's name here) which may be confidential and privileged. If you are not an intended recipient, please refrain from any disclosure, copying, distribution or use of this information and note that such actions are prohibited. Needless to say, the e-mail did not contain information from the company. And it was disclosed, copied and distributed. We all receive chain e-mails from friends and family who often send totally nonwork-related e-mail from their work address. Often with a similar disclaimer. Was this company allowing someone to forward a benign but obviously not work-related e-mail to more than two dozen people? No. And their rules stated so. But does it happen? Every minute, every day. Every week employees receive up to 30 chain letters, jokes, video clips or similar junk e-mail messages from someone they know, according to a study by market research firm Market Facts. This means many American workers have to deal with more than 1,500 pieces of junk e-mail each year from friends, family and colleagues. What does this mean? Lost productivity for us and our company. And lots of extra hours for tech folks already worrying how to stop ever-growing incoming spam. "Employees don't understand the risks of e-mail," said Nancy Flynn, executive director of the ePolicy Institute and co-author of the book "E-Mail Rules." "They don't know what (the company's) rules and policies and procedures are unless you put them in writing and educate them about it." Three-fourths of all companies put workplace e-mail policies in place not only to encourage employees to get back to work, but because a company can be held liable for e-mails sent from its e-mail system. In fact, 27 percent of Fortune 500 companies have defended themselves against claims of sexual harassment stemming from inappropriate e-mail or Internet use, according to the ePolicy Institute, a training and consulting firm that studies Internet and e-mail use. Chevron had to pay female employees $2.2 million to settle a sexual-harass-ment lawsuit stemming from inappropriate e-mail sent by male employees. But it's not just the companies that can get in trouble. In 2003, 22 percent of employers reported they had terminated an employee for violating e-mail rules, according to a 2003 e-mail survey from American Management Association, the ePolicy Institute and Clearswift, which makes security software. That figure was 14 percent in 2001. Companies are starting to make sure employees know what the rules are, said Flynn. Some companies allow employees a certain amount of time each day to send appropriate personal e-mails. Others will tell employees to tell friends to send them e-mail to a nonwork account. Although there are many spam-filter software programs, a lot of times those programs don't filter out "Pass On a Prayer or You Will Have Bad Luck" e-mails from your great-aunt Edna. The average employee spends 25 percent of the workday on e-mail, with 8 percent of workers devoting more than four hours a day to e-mail, according to the survey. But many of us have solutions for dealing with friendly junk e-mail. "I just don't open it," said Brian Chavis, chief executive of the ARGroup Inc., a computer network services company in Leesburg, Va. If he sees something that hints at a forwarded mass e-mail, he usually hits delete, no matter who it is from. E-mail to him is business. "Occasionally I'll get one from somebody (I was) just convinced knew better," he said. "If you get a hoax that people haven't checked out, they just appear to be very, very naive." One woman said that when she receives the annoying hoax e-mail from the occasional friend or colleague, she heads to www.urbanlegends.about.com, and replies to everyone on the list with a link showing it was a hoax. The woman always adds a note: "This site is great because you can check out the validity of the e-mail before you send it." Hint, hint. No, Neiman Marcus didn't charge $200 for that cookie recipe. Now get back to work.
Reproduced from an article published by omaha.com
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