This blog is now hosted at consciou.us

Wednesday, December 5, 2007

How not to Monitor Email

This is inspired by an article over at Worse Than Failure.

If you really want to fail at email monitoring, here are some ideas:

  1. Don't tell the employees.
  2. Don't create any policies that outline acceptable use.
  3. Don't create any policies that outline acceptable monitoring.
  4. Make sure the monitoring is as intrusive as possible, bonus points for trying to be covert, but telegraphing everything to the people being monitored.
  5. Cause mail delays or blockage.
  6. Be inconsistent.
  7. Use people to review every email-- better yet, outsource it to somewhere that doesn't care about your intellectual property.
  8. Implement it without much thought towards what you wish to accomplish, a vague feeling of "we should be monitoring" is enough to start.
  9. Don't talk to the HR department.
  10. Don't talk to the Legal department.
  11. Don't talk to IT, just foist it upon them at the last possible moment.

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