* Recent news of a U.S. rep sending inappropriate e-mails reinforces the reality that e-mails and IMs never actually go away
Last week’s revelation that a U.S. representative was caught sending highly inappropriate messages to underage pages is, unfortunately, only the latest in a long series of such stories that have impacted both sides of the aisle in the Congress and Senate over the past few decades. What makes this story unique, however, is the fact that e-mails and instant messages played such a prominent role in the story.
A key takeaway from this story is the fact that e-mails and IMs never really go away. As I’ve discussed before in this column, e-mail and IMs, although electronic, leave lots of fingerprints on your hard drive and e-mail servers, as well as on the hard drives and e-mail servers of the people to whom you send these messages.
In addition, there are backup tapes, archives, USB devices, laptops and other venues that could mean the single message you sent might end up being stored in five or more locations.
What that means, aside from the obvious implication that you should be careful about what you put in e-mail and IMs, is that organizations large and small must establish policies about appropriate and inappropriate e-mail use. These policies must offer very clear guidelines about what is acceptable and unacceptable use of corporate e-mail and other resources.
However, policies are not enough. They must be backed up by the use of content management systems that will check outgoing content in e-mails and IMs and then take the appropriate action: blocking these messages, providing popups to the offenders to remind them to obey corporate policies, or routing these messages to a supervisor or compliance officer for review.
Policies, coupled with content management systems that can back them up, are no longer an option for most organizations – they will become as much a part of your messaging security defense infrastructure as antivirus and antispam systems are today.
