General E Mail Question/Advice HELP!!!

[Ted Flanders_1]

I work for a company with 200 users over 9 states. We want to incorpate email. Host our own email using the @ ourcompanyname.com .
We are trying to convince our owner that we need to do this. His fear is that he will lose his business that he has built over the last 30 years because an employee of his sent some flaming email. Then he would be sued for it and lose everything.
We have an acceptable use policy in place, all five pages of it!
Can you help me come up with some evidence to show him, that will support our need for email?
Do you have an opinion on why we shouldnt have email?
Please........sound off!

[Jay Callis]

Hi,

I have just put together sendmail on an HP9000, HPUX 11.0. I am hosting about 1500 users. As far as controlling your fellow employees, from abusing there Internet access or email privilages, it is going to be hard to do. As Sys Admins that is your job. Are you familiar with sendmail? I take it your running sendmail?
It's like monitoring a website. You have to check the logs.
Policy's have to be enforced. People are not as dumb as they were 10 years ago. They realize that email can be monitored.

I hope that helps...

Jay

[Rita C Workman · Accepted solution]

Well unless you have someone doing the 'gestapo' on every email (which may or may not become an issue of privacy and harassement) - there is no way you could ensure that someone isn't going to send an email that mgmt (or another employee) may not like.
Anymore than mgmt could stop an employee from handwriting a 'flamer' ; putting a stamp on it ; and mailing it to a customer. So in reality email over the net is no different as snail mail-it just may be some of the laws haven't completely caught up yet. And isn't it against Federal laws to tamper with or interfere with the mail (..isn't it?)
So...............................unless of course your J Edgar Hoover....

Just my thoughts,

[Ted Flanders]

Rita,
You made the same points that I made with him. You cant do anything thru email that you cant do over the phone or through snail mail or even in person. He must have read an article where some business owner got sued over something one of his employees sent through the email. It is unfortunate. I feel that it is an imparitive part of business. Its aggravating trying to convince someone about something that "might" happen. But I guess if I had millions to lose????

[Bruce Regittko_1]

Hi,

To play devil's advocate for a moment, it is a heck of a lot more convenient to click the send button and send out a message that will be regretted later than it is to put that same message in an envelope, find a stamp, take it to the post office, ... . There is virtually no cooling off period and ordinarily reasonable people send some really stupid stuff.

That being said, education is the key. Acceptable use policies are one thing but real world examples are needed to illustrate the potential problems.

Now, to convince the boss, has anyone tried to figure out how much business and/or productivity is lost by not having email? I'll bet it is not insignificant.

If all else fails, convince him to give you a large chunk of stock in the business so that you have just as much to lose as he does :).

--Bruce

[Tim Malnati]

To some extent your boss has a point. If it's not there, then there is not need to police it (or administer it either). Agency law sort of makes the company responsible for the actions of its employees, but there are limits. Written statements communicated in emails certainly come under this umbrella.

But there may be a compromise here. It is entirely possible to setup sendmail as an internal only system. I would go on to suggest that the difficulty associated with setting it up this way would be dependent on how your wan is setup (if you have one).