Have they lost the plot with email content filters?

I remember, in a previous employment – the details of which shall remain anonymous , I used to send 100+ emails a day with attachments. It was my preference to using the phone (I was usually greeted by someones voicemail), or fax (have to join the queue at the sole fax machine in the office), or memo (don’t even start me with the photocopier).

One day I got 52 emails returned, and why?

“A Internal mail message has been blocked from being delivered as the e-mail contained inappropriate words which may be non-business related.”

Excuse me? Well this was a new initiative whereby the ‘Helpdesk’ checked all emails automatically as they went out and arrived in to make sure they were ‘suitable for the business’.

Of course all the emails were valid and were released some three hours later. Three hours you ask? Well, to get your email released you have to call the ‘helpdesk’ on some remote number and talk to some ‘customer service’ person, who will log your call and give you a reference number. Some time later someone else will send you an email to say they’ve been assigned your call and they’ve read through your email and want to know what the problem is. Well, you spend some time explaining to them who you are and what you do and why you need to send the email. You then find out they need authorisation to release your email so they’ll call you back. Then their boss calls back, has read the email and wants to know what the problem is. Why can’t you fax it? Well, don’t go there. Any way, after an ordeal amount of time you finally manage to justify the email to them, so they can approve your call and release the email sometime later within their predetermined SLA (Service Level Agreement), which for this sort of thing is currently 4 hours.

How long will it be before I get to the fax machine and someone is waiting to read all faxes before they are sent, or until I have to relay my telephone calls through a third party to ensure I’m not talking out of turn?

To cap it all, I received another email saying:

“Your folder is full, you cannot receive any more mail until you delete existing mail”. Full, yes, it was full of messages telling me I couldn’t send emails.

So have we come full circle? After all the effort made in getting us to use email in the first place, now they are doing their hardest to stop us.