FAQs about our Email Monitoring & Email Filtering Services
This is a list of the frequently asked questions that prospective clients ask about our services. Should you not find the answer that you are looking for, or want to discuss some matters in more detail, then please contact a member of our Sales Team on 01700 50 30 20 or by using our online enquiry form.
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General Questions
Questions about Dicontas
Pricing Questions
Contractual Questions
Legal Questions
Technical Questions
Security Questions
Business Processing Questions
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Q: What are the services you offer?
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Dicontas reviews and assesses all suspicious email messages that have been stopped by your email system’s content filter.
This is a manual assessment process that is carried out by our trained staff whose job is to assess and confirm offensive content that has been sent or received through your business email system. All assessment is carried out independently, impartially and remains strictly confidential.
Examples of the types of email messages that we would review, score and report upon would be email messages that contain offensive words (such as swear words or other derogatory phrases which may offend employees); or sexually explicit adult-rated image attachments.
We report upon all manually confirmed instances of inappropriate materials to your nominated HR representative so that they can decide whether to take disciplinary action upon the sender of the offensive email message.
We allow you to outsource the “content assessment” function that demands heavy staff resources in the administration of email monitoring technology.
Q: Why should I use your service?
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When you adopt email content filtering into your organisation then all suspicious email messages must be redirected and manually reviewed to a responsible and trusted employee. This person must assess whether the contents of the email has contravened any terms or conditions listed in your ‘Acceptable Use Policy’.
Dicontas now gives you the choice as to whether to outsource the content assessment process to a professional outsourcer whose sole business and focus is to allow IT and HR departments to pass on the responsibility for reviewing suspicious email messages for inappropriate content.
The ease of which email users can send offensive content results in large volumes of email messages being stopped by content filtering technology. Having to review every stopped email can quickly drain your current human resources.
The choice is twofold: either continue to review and assess suspicious content internally, or outsource the responsibility for content assessment to Dicontas. To the best of our knowledge, there are no other organisations that are offering the same portfolio of services that we offer.
If you decide to outsource this responsibility for content assessment, then you will save time, money, effort and not risk breaking the laws surrounding the content assessment of business emails in the workplace.
Q: What benefits does your service bring to the market?
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By outsourcing the content assessment of suspicious email messages to Dicontas, you will reduce your annual assessment costs by 40-80+% as compared to keeping this function in-house. Complex start-up costs are also eliminated as we limit your organisation’s visibility to these types of offensive materials and we have designed our system and business processes to fully comply with the complex legal guidelines and laws surrounding email monitoring in the workplace.
Our business is to allow you the choice to free up your IT and HR staff from not having to continually assess offensive email content.
We also reduce the risk to your business as this process is handled by trained staff that have been carefully selected, recruited and trained to assess suspicious, offensive and illegal content.
We allow organisations to use email monitoring technology cost-effectively and to limit the risk on your email users through the proper implementation and ease of use of this technology.
Q: Do you filter our business email messages?
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No. Content filtering of emails is done by a content filtering engine. This filter is either a software product that has already been purchased by your company - or is part of a managed email security service. It is this filter that looks at every email message that is passed through your business email system. When this filter identifies a suspicious email message then this tool can be configured to either let the email pass through to its intended recipient(s); or the delivery information can be recorded for management reporting purposes; or the email message can be copied or redirected to another email address for manual assessment.
Dicontas is neither a developer nor supplier of these content filter tools. We provide centralised human resources needed to assess suspicious email messages that have been stopped, copied or redirected by the email content filter for manual assessment.
In order to use our service, your organisation must already have an email filtering product or managed service in place.
Q: What is your Image & Content Filtering Assessment Services for Businesses service?
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This service allows you to outsource the responsibility of having to manually review suspicious images that are of a sexually explicit nature, in addition to banned words and phrases that may contain profanity or other offensive words. If your content filtering tool is able to identify email messages contain pornographic images and banned words then these emails are redirected to us for secure, impartial and strictly confidential assessment.
If an email is manually confirmed to contain inappropriate content, then we produce an Incident Report and pass all the necessary details to your HR department so that disciplinary action can be initiated on the individual(s) who have sent pornographic or other offensive materials through your business email system.
Q: What industry sectors and geographic areas do you supply?
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Our service is available to any organisation that has the technology already in place to monitor email messages for suspicious content. As this is the only technical prerequisite then any organisation in any industry sector can use our service.
Dicontas only supplies the service to organisations that operate their primary operations within the United Kingdom.
Q: What is in it for me?
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If you are a company director or shareholder then the use of our service will mean that you are not risking personal prosecution if your company is proven to be operating illegally in the monitoring and assessment of email messages. The use of our service also demonstrates that you have taken all precautions to prevent your email users from continued email abuse and other damaging payloads.
If you are a departmental director or manager, who has primary or shared ownership in the running of an email monitoring system, or responsible for the provision of staffing for the management of this technology, then you can make annual savings of 40-80+% in the cost of policing this technology and alleviate the need to change your departmental structure and working procedures.
You can be assured that you will be choosing a path towards trouble-free and risk-free email monitoring, and that all suspicious email messages will be handled securely and that all data will remain in strictest of confidence at all times.
Q: What is involved in setting up the service and how long does this take?
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Apart from signing the relevant contracts and paying for the service, all you have ‘technically’ do is to arrange for your IT email administrator to configure your email content filter to redirect all suspicious emails to an email address which will be provided to you during the completion of the contractual paperwork.
All reports are then emailed to three nominated staff members within your IT and HR departments. The named HR representative will receive Incident Reports that details occurrences of confirmed cases of the sending of inappropriate email content; the named IT representative will receive a Blacklisting report detailing repeat offenders sending offensive inbound emails; and finally a senior departmental manager will receive a monthly management reports detailing monthly statistics and trend analysis data.
After the completion of the contractual paperwork, the setting up of the system for a new client will take normally one working day.
Q: Will the introduction of our service risk disrupting our business operations?
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No. The only technical modification happens during the modification of the configuration of your email filter. This is simply changing the email address as to where the suspicious email messages are to be redirected to. This change will normally be immediate and no email messages will be lost due to this change.
Q: We do not presently monitor our business email messages – what should we do?
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Companies that rely on email communications as part of their business operations are at serious risk if they do not currently monitor their email messages for suspicious content. By not filtering the content within email messages, they will leave themselves open to risk as they are allowing their own employees to read and send potentially offensive content. This type of content can offend any person opening up the inappropriate email message and may seek legal advice if they are upset or discriminated by the materials sent to them.
Email monitoring technology is now very affordable and can be rented as a managed service. The cost of this technology is a fraction of what it could cost your organisation by failing to adequately protect your email users and the potential abuse that can be effortless sent over this communication channel.
The UK Information Commissioner Office website provides useful guidelines for organisations wishing to monitor their own email communications.
Q: Our company also have overseas offices – can we still become a customer?
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For UK corporations that also operate overseas, then as long as your business email system is operated within the United Kingdom and your end users (whose email messages are being monitored by a filtering product or service) is licensed and operated in the UK, then we can service your needs. This restriction is due to legal constraints and the different application and focus of national laws governing monitoring in the workplace.
Q: How do you assess the content of suspicious email messages?
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There are two types of content filtering when monitoring email content: word analysis and image analysis.
If the email content filter stops an email because it contains banned words or phrases, then these emails will be redirected to us where we score and rate the severity of the email based on a scorecard. This scorecard not only works on the frequency and severity of individual words, but the human assessor looks at the context of the banned word and assesses the subjectivity of how it is used within the sentence or paragraph.
If the email content filter stops an email because it contains a suspicious image, then the human assessor will look at the image and rate its severity level by looking at what the picture contains and what the image is trying to portray. A scorecard is used to rate individual elements that are contained within the image together with an overall severity rating.
We also align our scorecard to your own ‘acceptable use policy’ so that both you and all your email users know exactly what will be classified as acceptable and what will be unacceptable.
Q: How can I get more information about your services?
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Our Sales and Technical Support advisors are available to be contacted during office hours of 9am-5pm Monday to Friday (except Public holidays):
Sales and General Enquiries Team - 0845 3100 836
Technical Support Team - 0845 3100 839
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Q: What guarantees do we have that you will remain in operation and honour all the terms of the contract throughout the life of our service contract?
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We run a tight ship where everyone clearly knows what do to and their accountability for continued success in the marketplace. We are an innovative company with a unique service portfolio. We have to maintain accountability to the Police and other authorities.
We have heavily invested in our technical infrastructure to provide a system that is secure, resilient, robust and able to be customised to our evolving customer requirements and any changes to the relevant laws regarding email monitoring and assessment in the workplace. All design and development work is carried out in-house by our skilled IT development team.
Our management team is experienced to continue to gain stronger footholds in the global market for email monitoring products and services. This market remains very strong with industry expects citing over 30% compound annual growth rate till 2010.
Our sales pipeline, financial planning system, and recruitment processes are fully aligned to maintain the right levels and quality of service to our existing and expanding client base.
Q: How do you select the right calibre of staff to assess suspicious content?
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Dicontas’s only business is in the provision of centralised human-based content assessment services. Dicontas was started to supply these services and we do not provide any other outsourced ‘call-centre’ type activities. This allows us to select, recruit, train and retain the correct calibre of staff needed when their job entails dealing with offensive materials day in, day out.
All our employees are vetted by the correct authorities and have signed a confidentiality agreement to guarantee customer and data confidentiality.
Q: What is your operational capacity?
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We have a current operational capacity to handle 250,000 mailboxes.
Q: What is your experience in the email monitoring and security market?
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Our management team has over 15 years of experience in email security and systems management. We have over 5 years experience in the application of email monitoring in the workplace.
Q: Where are your offices located?
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Our offices are located on the Isle of Bute, 30 miles west of Glasgow. This location was chosen for the availability of suitable staff and to keep operational overheads down. BT has a fully enabled digital exchange that allows Dicontas to maintain an effective communication route to the Internet to conduct core email communications.
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Q: How much is the service?
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The recommended price for our individual services is £9.50 (excl. VAT) per email user (i.e. per unique email address) per annum. Discounts are available for purchasing the combined Image & Content Assessment services together; buying direct from Dicontas; for high volume sales; and for multi-year contracts. Current prices are available upon request from our Sales team.
A fair use policy will be used where higher than expected email assessment volumes will carry an additional charge that is proportional to the use of the service. A fair-use policy must be in place as human operators are manually assessing every suspicious email messages and this carries a higher cost overhead than a system that was fully automated and processed solely within a computer system.
Q: What are the payment terms for your service?
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It is usual for managed service providers within the email security market to request for a minimum of a 12 month contract with full payment to be paid up before service commences. Dicontas also follows this charging model.
More flexible payments may be considered to those organisations wishing to secure Dicontas’s content assessment services for 1,000 email users and above.
Q: Do we get a refund if we change our minds?
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No. Once you enter into a written contract for our services, then you cannot get a refund for any of the remaining time period of the unused contract.
Q: Can we purchase your service as a packaged software product?
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No. We only offer an internet-level managed content assessment service. What you will receive is an incident report (for each occurrence of an email message with unacceptable content), ad-hoc blacklisting reports, monthly management reports and email messages (that were originally directed to your email users) that we forward onto you once we confirm that the message contains only acceptable content.
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Q: What legal contracts are signed before commencing with your service?
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There are three contracts that must be completed and signed by both parties:
a) Customer Specification Agreement: this details the exact service requirements of the customer, including contact details, and the conditions when assessing suspicious content on behalf of the customer.
b) Service Agreement – including Payment Terms and Conditions, and Service Level Agreements
c) A Confidentiality Agreement signed by Dicontas and passed to the customer
Q: What service level agreements do you offer – and what can be tailored for my own business requirements?
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Dicontas offers guarantees that we will process suspicious email messages within an agreed timeframe. We also offer various levels of quality assurance and operational work times.
If your email users are operational 7 days a week and you want us to assess suspicious email messages that match your own operational hours then this requirement can be accommodated within the Service Contract and a price agreed.
Q: Can we terminate our contract at any time?
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Yes. But we will not offer a refund for any unspent time of the contract.
Q: What are your guaranteed service level agreements?
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That Dicontas will complete the assessment of suspicious emails within the agreed service levels as specified in the Service Agreement; and that Dicontas will maintain data security and client confidentiality.
A direct failure of Dicontas’s to fulfil any of its service level agreement conditions will mean a reimbursement or credit equivalent to an agreed proportion of that current month’s service payment as stipulated in the Service Agreement.
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Q: Why do we need an ‘Acceptable Use Policy’?
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An acceptable use policy (AUP) is a corporate document that all employees have to accept as part of their employment conditions. This document should clearly explain what email users can and cannot do. The document will provide examples of what is inappropriate to send via email and will list conditions where employees may/will face disciplinary procedures or face gross-misconduct charges.
Q: What laws are relevant to monitor emails in my workplace?
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Note: Always remember to seek professional legal advice on any matters that may rise from the information presented.
Email communication and monitoring within a UK workplace is governed and regulated by many UK laws, regulations and government guidelines.
These regulations are trying to get the correct balance between the protection of the employer (to maintain business operations) and the rights to privacy for the employee.
Most of the relevant UK/EU laws concerning email communication, monitoring and investigation are listed below.
- Computer Misuse Act 1990
- Data Protection Act 1998
- Defamation Act 1996
- Electronic Communications Bill 2000
- Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000
- Employment Relations Act 2004
- Parts 1 and 2 - EU Working Party on Work Monitoring WP55 (5401/01/EN/Final)
- Interception of Communications Act 1985
- Human Rights Act 1998
- The Data Protection (Processing of Sensitive Personal Data) Order 2000
- The Information Commissioner’s Employment Practices Data Protection Code, Section 3, Monitoring at Work
- The Telecommunications (Lawful Business Practice) (Interception of Communications) Regulations (LBPR) 2000
- UK Employment Equality Act 1998
- Freedom of Information Act (2000)
- Obscene Publications Act 1959 - "does the article have a tendency to deprave or corrupt the persons who are likely to read, see or hear it?
- Public Order Act 1986 - "prohibit the use of threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour, or displaying any written material which is threatening, abusive or insulting with the intention of stirring up racial hatred or where racial hatred is likely to be stirred up"
- The Crime and Disorder Act 1998 - "racially aggravated offences"
Other laws concerning employment law and working practices may also be relevant and will need to be investigated.
Also expect many UK laws to be updated in line with EU laws (which tend to have stronger rights towards privacy for employees) as more case law is produced through EU courts.
Q: Do we have to inform our staff that their emails are being monitored?
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Yes. You must inform and have formal agreement procedures in place that clearly demonstrate that every email user (using your business email system) has accepted the terms and conditions of your acceptable use policy for email use.
Q: Do we have to inform our staff of your new service?
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If your acceptable use policy has already informed all email users that you may be monitoring email communications for inappropriate materials then you do not need to inform your staff of our new service. If your acceptable use policy does not clearly stipulated that monitoring may be carried out then you will have to add this clause this your AUP statement and make sure that all email user know of this change and accept it as part of the terms of use for email communication on your business email system.
Q: Does your service fully comply with all the necessary UK laws?
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Yes. We have designed our system and our business processes to process and assess suspicious email content whilst fully abiding by all the relevant UK laws for email assessment for the UK workplace.
We have taken legal advice from both English Barrister and Scottish Advocates who have specialist legal knowledge in the handling and data processing of suspicious content that has been communicated by email.
We are in full collaboration with local Police, Computer Crime Unit and other relevant authorities.
Q: Do you notify the police of illegal content?
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The law is very clear in this matter and any deviation from the law may risk serious criminal penalties for all people who are in ownership of illegal materials.
If you are aware that any illegal content has passed through your business email system or that a specific email user has knowingly stored or transmitted such material on a computer system, then you must report all instances to the Police for further investigation. The Internet Watch Foundation website is a recommended website to learn how IT management must carefully handle and report illegal content to the Police – otherwise you may risk criminal prosecution.
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Q: What are the technical prerequisites to use your service?
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To use our content assessment services, your organisation must already have the technology in place to monitor emails in the workplace. You must have the ability to filter email messages based on inappropriate words/phrases or be able to filter for sexually explicit images.
This filter must be able to redirect all suspicious email messages to an internet email address as supplied by Dicontas during the setting up of the service. This email address will end in @content-assessor.com.
The redirected emails must have the ‘Sender’ address as a valid email address within your registered internet domain name (e.g. word-filter@yourcompany.co.uk or image-filter@yourcompany.com); and that the ‘From’, ‘To’, ‘CC address fields must contain the email addresses of the original sender and recipient(s).
It should be noted that all good email filtering tools will have this capability otherwise the internal IT email administrator would not be able to assess who has sent and received suspicious email messages within your organisation.
Please check with your IT email administrator or the supplier of your email content filtering tool or managed service provider.
Q: We use an internal email monitoring tool to filter messages – can we use your service?
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Yes - as long as your email monitoring tool has the capability to scan and redirect email messages based on banned words/phrases or in the identification of sexually explicit images.
Please read the answer to the ‘What are the technical prerequisites to use your service’ question to make sure that meet these requirements.
Your email filter must be able to support the redirection of suspicious emails to an external internet address as supplied by Dicontas.
Q: We use a managed service provider to monitor our email messages – can we use your service?
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Yes - as long as your email monitoring tool has the capability to scan and redirect email messages based on banned words/phrases or in the identification of sexually explicit images.
Please read the answer to the ‘What are the technical prerequisites to use your service’ question to make sure that meet these requirements.
Your email filter must be able to support the redirection of suspicious emails to an external internet address as supplied by Dicontas.
Q: What happens if our email system becomes faulty?
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Using Dicontas for content assessment services will not effect how your own email system operates.
If your email system stops working as expected, for example, if your email server cannot send email to an external source, then any suspicious emails will be queued within your email server until normal operations resume.
Q: What happens if there is a technical fault on the Internet which disrupts email communication?
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When a technical communication fault occurs - that stops email servers from passing on email messages - then email servers will queue all email traffic until normal operations resume.
If you use an email relay server to communicate over the Internet (where two email servers communicate via a third email server) then email messages are normally queued for up to 5 days. This time period is enough to make sure that all suspicious email messages will be redirected to Dicontas for content assessment. Any reports or appropriate email messages that we send will also be queued until normal operations resume.
If you use a managed service for content filtering, then the service provider will also queue email traffic (up to a known time period) until normal operations resume.
Q: What happens if a technical fault occurs within your system?
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We have designed our IT infrastructure to be resilient against most hardware faults. However, should a core component fail, then we have taken all reasonable precautions to protect against loss of data. We have redundant servers to allow for most operations to continue. Should communications be interrupted by an external internet communication fault, then emails and reports will be queued until normal operations resume.
Q: What technical infrastructure do you use to ensure smooth operations?
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We use industry-grade server and internet communication equipment. All our servers have data storage RAID protection and battery backup cache to protect against data loss. We have purchased enough processing and storage capacity to handle 250,000 email user accounts with up to two years of management report data.
We have redundant links to the internet to protect against a failure at the Internet Service Provider (ISP) level.
We use three levels of anti-virus scanning using two different anti-virus suppliers.
We also have three layers of industry-strength firewalls to protect against unauthorised intruders.
We have the ability to use encrypted email message communication (normally referred to TLS) if your email server has the ability to encrypt email data.
We use WinZip encryption with password protection for all email attachments that we send to you to make sure that no one can easily view sensitive and personal data that we will pass to your during service operations.
All out IT staff are highly skilled to ensure smooth and quick reactions should any IT problems be raised.
Q: What is your technical capacity to process suspicious email messages?
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Our IT infrastructure has been designed to run at an average of 25% processing capacity; our data storage capacity will allow for two years worth of management data and to handle 10 days worth of incoming email message traffic should any critical hardware system component fail and need to be replaced.
There is always enough offline tape backup storage capacity to store all essential databases and email file backups should an emergency recovery state be called upon. We also utilise industry-strength offsite data recovery services to protect against critical data loss should we lose our ability to function within our existing building infrastructure.
We maintain the correct levels of dedicated internet connectivity to keep email message transfer response times down to an acceptable level. We currently have 24Mb of internet bandwidth to process email communications.
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Q: How secure is your system?
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We have three layers of industry-strength firewall protection to guard against unauthorised computer access. We follow industry-grade procedures to maintain internal security. Our entire server infrastructure uses the latest, stable server operation system platform and all security patches are frequently applied to guard against mal-ware, spy-ware and known security holes.
We have three layers of secured computer access for operational staff to gain authorised access into our production systems.
We have also designed our production systems so that no email header information can be seen or accessed by our Content Assessment teams. In other words, no human operator can see the entire email message when we assess suspicious content. To whom the email messages was sent from, and to, cannot be viewed or copied by an agent. The agents also have no ability to copy or print neither any message body nor any image attachment as this protects against any duplication of any offensive materials or client confidential data.
All databases are enterprise-grade and critical data files are fully encrypted.
All offsite backups are fully encrypted with secure access codes.
The use of strong passwords is mandatory and system access passwords are changed on a frequent basis.
All employees have signed a confidentiality agreement and have been vetted by the proper authorities in the handling of potentially offensive and illegal materials.
All our operational agents use thin-clients to protect against computer viruses and other common computer security holes that are common in PC workstation operating systems.
Q: How secure is your office premises?
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Our office premises are manned 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
All access into server and communication equipment is secure with intruder alarm and security-access locks into the Server Communication room. Only authorised and key personnel may gain access to the Servers. There is no ability to gain computer-based access to servers from remote locations.
All removable backup media is secured in a locked safe and located in a secure room.
Q: How do you ensure confidentiality of our data?
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All employees have signed a confidentiality agreement and have been vetted by the proper authorities in the handling of potentially offensive and illegal materials.
All the proper computer security is in place to maintain that only authorised access can be gained by the correct IT staff for system maintenance tasks.
Q: How do you maintain security when your employees assess email content?
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We have designed our production systems so that no email header information can be seen or accessed by our Content Assessment teams. In other words, no human operator can see the entire email message when they assess suspicious email content. To whom the email messages was sent from, and to, cannot be viewed or copied by an agent at any time. The agents also have no ability to copy or print neither any message body nor any image attachment as this protects against duplication of any offensive or client confidential data. What this means is that only the message body is viewed by the agent when assessing word content, and that only images are viewed by the agent when assessing image content.
Operational staff must successfully login through three layers of security access to gain access into the production system. All user access and operations are fully logged for formal auditing purposes.
The parsing of email messages are carried out automatically between our email server, application server and database server transactional layers. All reports and appropriately-rated email messages are generated automatically by our internally developed software applications.
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Q: Do you inform the sender/receiver that the email has been assessed as unacceptable?
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We can set business rules within the system to notify the sender and/or the recipient(s) that suspicious emails have been redirected to Dicontas for content assessment. These rules should also be configurable within your existing email filtering system.
However, warning your email users gives the opportunity for the senders of suspicious content enough time to deleted, sometimes permanently removing important files from their local or networked system. Such evidence may be required and your IT department may need to freeze a user’s mailbox and network account to take an essential backup of the users’ files, email messages and audit logs for added legal protection.
We therefore recommend that you do choose not to enable these rules. This is strongly recommended should there be any risk of your email users sending or receiving illegal content.
Q: How long will suspicious emails be delayed whilst they are being assessed?
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During the signing of the contract, it will be agreed by all parties that Dicontas will process (assess) email messages within agreed service levels timeframes.
The actual time taken will depend on the volume of new emails to be processed and the number of individual images or banned words that have to be assessed.
Q: How do you handle suspicious emails and what do you do with them?
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We handle every suspicious email with extreme caution. We have clear corporate policies, procedures and guidelines in how our operational staff reviews and assesses content within the email messages. Only the content that needs to be assessed will be passed to our operational staff and will remain within a secure computer system that has been designed and developed for the secure and impartial assessment of suspicious content.
We use a scorecard to assess, classify, describe and rate the severity of confirmed inappropriate content. This scorecard is aligned to your own acceptable use policy so that you, your HR department and your email users know exactly what is acceptable and what is not acceptable to send or receive through your business email system.
If an email is scored as containing unacceptable content, then an Incident Report is sent to your nominated HR representative to process the case.
If an email is assessed to contain acceptable content, then it is forwarded on to the intended recipient(s).
Q: What information is contained within an Incident Report?
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The Incident Report contains all the information necessary to process a disciplinary case. It details who sent the email and who was the intended recipients; when and what email server it was transmitted by; the subject title and unique message ID of the email message; the overall severity of the contents of the email; the individual severities of individual images or banned words; a clear description of the images contained within; details of the image file and its properties and a unique digital fingerprint to prove that the image assesses matches the image that was attached to the email. Also contained within this report is the email header information so that your IT department can trace the email message within their email server audit logs should this be called upon during a legal case.
All confirmed cases of inappropriate content will be attached to the report and will be encrypted and password protected. The report and any attachments will be emailed to your nominated HR representative.
Q: What information do the Management Reports contain?
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The Management Report will contain all the necessary volumes and breakdowns of suspicious emails that have been redirected to Dicontas for content assessment. This will contain management data to allow your nominated departmental head or manager to conclude the numbers of staff and their frequency of the sending and receiving of confirmed inappropriate and appropriate email messages.
Trend analysis data will also be in the report to allow management to assess whether certain types of occurrences are on the increase or are decreasing over time and whether any remedial action (changes to corporate policy, education of the end user, tightening of email user behaviours, a full network audit) is justified.
The management report will be emailed to your nominated departmental manager.
Q: How do you align your content assessment process with our own Acceptable Use Policy?
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When the content of suspicious emails is assessed, our agents use a scorecard to assess and rate content. This scorecard is aligned to your own acceptable use policy during the contractual paperwork process so that our agents are aligned to your own company guidelines on email use. As Dicontas assess suspicious content for many organisations, over many industry sectors and verticals, we are in the best position to impartially and objectively rate content without any ties to the end users.
Q: How accurate are the reports?
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All the necessary data associated with the processing of email messages and the handling and scoring of suspicious content is captured and stored within our custom databases. The processing and outcomes from the content assessment activities are fully recorded with our assessment database.
This means that our reports are very accurate and can store vast amounts of historical data. All processing outcomes and audit trails are stored in the database so that your HR and IT departments can request this data should this be needed for a future employment tribunal or court case.
However, any data that is no longer needed to process an incident of the sending of inappropriate content will be permanently destroyed together with email messages. This procedure confirms the principles of the Data Protection Act.
Q: Who is responsible for producing the reports and who are they sent to?
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All reports are automatically triggered by an agent who has manually assessed and confirmed an instance of inappropriate content being contained within a suspicious email. The reports are generated by our application servers and no human operator will see these reports unless you have authorised Dicontas Operational staff to review a specific report for clarification matters.
This process maintains client confidentiality and does not risk information about an individual (i.e. one of your email users) unnecessarily being made available to a member of our staff.
Q: What customisation is available within the service?
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The following business rules can be customised for the each customer:
- service level response times for the processing of suspicious email content - individually configurable for low, normal and high priority email messages
- the email address in which to send the Incident Reports
- the email address in which to send the Blacklisting Reports
- the email address in which to send the Management Reports
- what types of images or words will be assessed as inappropriate
- whether to append the email header information onto the Incident Report
- whether to notify internal and/or external senders that a suspicious email has been redirected to Dicontas for assessment
- whether to forward, and to the intended recipient(s) or a nominated email administrator, for email messages that have been incorrectly passed to Dicontas for assessment
This list of not exhaustive and all customised business rules will be presented to the customer during the completion of the Customer Specification Agreement.
More business rules will be added as and when customer requirements and the legal framework evolve.
Q: Can we customise any reports?
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No. The reports have been designed based upon legal advice supplied to Dicontas. These reports contain all the necessary information to process a case where one of your email users have sent or received inappropriate content.
We offer some report customisation for the Incident Reports in terms of whether to append the ‘email message header’ onto this report.
The Management Reports are currently emailed to your nominated departmental manager. We will, at some time in the future, make these report available online via a secure internet portal. When this happens, you will be able to customise these reports to show various types of historical data that more closely suits your management requirements.
Q: What new features will be added to your service?
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Dicontas will always consider new customer requirements that help the service to continually improve and innovate. We will always welcome feedback on how to improve our service deliverables and customer satisfaction levels.
Q: What are your compliant and escalation procedures?
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Our compliant and problem escalation procedures will be documented in the Service Contract. If a customer has a compliant then our customer services department will handle this compliant in a professional and timely manner. Should any issue need to be escalated to higher management, then this will be carried out as documented and agreed by all parties.
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