Email compliance is a necessary corporate objective to ensure that email communication remains free of inappropriate materials that may damage or strain the relationships between your workforce. Many managers see the protection against viruses, spyware and email spam as being the highest priority and they are there are a plethora of tools to enable companies to do this pretty well – as this is a mature market, but some organisations overlook content filtering.
Email filtering is a tool to allow both inbound and outbound emails to be scanned for abusive materials that are likely to break existing ‘Acceptable Use Policy’ statements and runs the risk of upsetting staff that read and are hurt or angered by the proliferation of such inappropriate content.
IT Managers have three solutions to implement email filtering: namely, a managed service where emails are scanned whilst travelling between the company and the internet; a server appliance, where emails are scanned within the company network and is automatically configured to run immediately; or a email server add-on program, which is installed, configured and manually maintained by the companies IT department and either installed on the email server or on another dedicated server . All three solutions are viable for most modern organisations, but the managed service option has most effective content filter as its algorithm for detecting inappropriate content is constantly updated in line with real-time attacks that are happening over many of its own client base. The effectiveness of the other two in-house solutions depend on the skills of the companies IT department and the email filtering vendors capacity to keep its scanning engine up to date with the latest rules to identify and stop the latest inappropriate content.
An online Image Filtering & Assessment Costing Tool has been created to estimate the volume, cost and staff resources required in the assessment and processing of business emails (with suspicious image attachments) that have been stopped when using a corporate email ‘image-analysis / porn’ filtering system.
The on-line tool can be accessed from this page: Image Filtering & Assessment Costing Tool
The purposes of this tool is to allow business management to calculate the estimated volume of suspicious email messages that will be:
- stopped by your ‘image-analysis / porn’ filter system as it may contain suspect pornographic images
- redirected to an human ‘assessor’ to manually review the contents of these suspicious email messages
- assessed to be a true positive (it does have pornographic content) or a false positive (it does not contain any inappropriate content)
…and to estimate the staff time needed:
- for the nominated ‘Email Assessor’ to assess, review and process emails with suspicious content
- for Human Resources to investigate and document the evidence required to process a formal disciplinary case – where an email incident contain pornographic content has been raised
- for an IT System Administrator to investigate, to search for computer evidence, and to take all the relevant backups, and to produce the relevant documentation to support these formal disciplinary proceedings
The tool will report the estimated annual costs to process suspicious email message image attachments internally (in-house) and then use these annual cost to calculate the potential annual savings your organisation can make by outsourcing the processing and management of this suspicious email content to Dicontas.
The Dicontas Blog site (on Email Monitoring and Email Filtering) has been updated to use WordPress 2.0.5.
This is a required upgrade. The installation went as planned and all site features and installed plugins seem to be fully working.
Great work again by the WordPress Team.
Dicontas provides a new generation of centralised email monitoring administration and email content assessment services for businesses that currently monitor their own email communications.
Dicontas provide unique outsourced services to allow organisations to safely and cost-efficiently outsource the heavy administration workload associated with the use of email monitoring and content filtering technology.
More info on Dicontas’s centralised email filtering administration services
Written on 04 September 2006
by Dicontas Blog Admin under
Company News, General Info, News, Services & Products
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Tagged with administration, assessment_services, business_email, centralisation, content_assessment, content_filtering, cost_reduction, email_monitoring, legal_compliance, managed_services, outsourcing, time_saving, total_cost_of_ownership