Forget all the V1agra messages and the random blocks of Shakespeare and phish. That's why you've got anti-spam software. But what are you going to do about what Ross Mayfield calls occupational spam - the dreck and detritus your co-workers insist on sending around the corporate net? Do we really need people hitting "Repy to All" to add "way to go!" or "Me, too!" to some memo? And don't get me started on chain letters or offers of free kittens. Mayfield writes:
Email is no longer a productivity tool thanks to commercial and occupational spam.
One possible answer, at least for Outlook shops, is a simple custom form in Outlook that would block reply-to-all on internal mail. But Rick Klaus argues this would cause more trouble than it's worth, because the sort of people who would forward a chain letter to the whole company would promptly start complaining to IS about how their e-mail is now broken.
Has this been a problem for you? If your company uses e-mail for collaborative work, have you tried escaping these time-wasters with blogs, Wikis or, as Denise Howell suggests, something like Socialtext?
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