> In a corporate setting a company may or may not have an > Internet/email/conduct policy. If not, it may be very dificult to fire > someone for conduct that they didn't agree to abide by and if it came to > a lawsuit they would probably loose.
In fact, in TN, a long-haul trucker won a worker's comp lawsuit against his employer for injuries suffered while having sex in his cab, driving down the road and he was hit by a train (the female "passenger", having no seat belt and not being seated in a passenger seat anyway, was thrown from the truck and killed). The first court ruled against the trucker (holding the belief that such behavior was outside the bounds of reasonable on-the-job behavior and as such, not a compensible accident). Higher courts ruled for the trucker - there was no written policy prohibiting such behavior and this person was used to doing this on a routine basis while performing his job (doesn't this make you feel safe, driving the freeway when it is full of trucks?). So, yes, without a written policy prohibiting certain behavior, you will probably lose in a suit. However, in any case, using porn email as "proof" of violating a written policy would probably also result in losing such a suit -- all it would take is having one person on a jury that has an email account of their own -- eventually, everyone gets porn email, it seems, and once on the list, the amount seems to keep adding up (we even get it on email accounts that were set up as a mailing list for internal distribution, that have never sent any emails out to the world). And much porn email can look as though it was asked for, substituting first names (gathered using many techniques) into long messages, using subject lines that look as tho you asked for the information (lures to get the email opened), etc. A better use of Declude would be to offer porn filtering (delete on detection) and spam forwarding (for retrieval of misclassified messages when necessary). Better proof would be simply browsing someones workstation and web surfing history (few delete such things and one of the worst cases I ever worked on was an attorney several years back that had installed compression onto his drives in order to make room for all the pornographic games, pictures, movies that had been downloaded and stored all over his official company computer). K. Oland --- [This E-mail was scanned for viruses by Declude Virus (http://www.declude.com)] --- This E-mail came from the Declude.JunkMail mailing list. To unsubscribe, just send an E-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED], and type "unsubscribe Declude.JunkMail". The archives can be found at http://www.mail-archive.com.
