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Email Filth

Awesometown

on Feb. 2, 2008

The big headline this week has been three county employees getting fried for using their work email and private message system to send over 9,000 messages in the past 6 months, a majority of which were explicit and/or sexual in nature. One county official was given a written repremand for a message sent between himself and one of the three fired employees which used sexual innuendo. His slap on the wrist looks bad in the eyes of the public, however it comes down to the fact that he only had one message against him and not 9,000 which for anyone doing the math is about 25 a day on average for each of them.

The funny thing is, this all happened on accident. The county was doing an audit and did a search of their message system for any messages relating to a specific search term to help with the audit. The search tells who has sent messages relating to that topic and when the message was sent. However, the way the system is set up they cannot retrieve one specific message they have to open all the messages that person sent in a month. So the county looked up the person who sent the message they needed, opened the messages from that month, and were flabbergasted at the filth they found. So they went back another month and found the same results, they went back as far as they could go and found 6 months worth of evidence. They looked up the other employees the messages were sent to and recieve from and found the same results. They finally did a search of the entire system. And although they found people using the work message system for personal usage, they did not find anything explicit.

The whole thing has had offices talking. A few people in my office seemed a little nervous, a couple people talked about the legality, most laughed while reading the transcripts.

Go Patriots!