Re: Personal Email

[Valdis Kletnieks <Valdis.Kletnieks () VT EDU>]

On Mon, 26 Oct 2009 09:45:12 EDT, Daniel Bennett said:
> Does anyone have a policy that specifically says that the use of personal
> email on College owned PCs is not allowed? (POP, IMAP, Web, Direct Exchange,
> etc)?

Ouch.  That's going to be about as difficult to enforce as "mo personal
phone calls" and for the same basic reasons.  Remember - don't ever make
a policy that you don't know how to enforce.

Consider 2 people that work in different departments of your institution.
They exchange one set of e-mails regarding school business, a second set
of e-mail regarding a trip their kids are taking this weekend, and then
a third set regarding different school business.  All 3 sets of e-mail
traverse the same school servers and no others.

How do you intend to enforce the policy and deal with that second set?

You might want to think about what problem you're trying to solve by saying
"no personal e-mail".  Is it an employee productivity issue?  Maybe the rule
should be "no personal e-mail while you're on the clock" (consider if the
user is using their own  Blackberry/etc, not a college-owned one).

If it's a security issue ("but the e-mail might be a virus"), you have two
bigger problems - first, that your PCs aren't secured enough to read e-mail
at all (consider if the virus comes from another PC inside the school), and
the second that many of the malware e-mails get opened even though they
don't *look* like personal e-mail (consider the flood of "webmail upgrade"
phishes).

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