On 20/06/2011 09:20, Tom Kinghorn wrote:
Good morning all.
what would be the best way to block (or substitute) profanity in the
Subject & body of mails.
Are you trying to prevent your users from sending profanity, or are you
trying to prevent profanity reaching them if sent to them by external
sources?
If the former, this is not a technical problem and should not be
addressed by technical means. It should be a part of your internal AUP
that users may not send objectionable or offensive material using your
organisation's email system. Users who break it should be subject to
your normal disciplinary proceedings.
If the latter, then you may want to use a simple "bad word" filter to
block emails containing egregiously bad language. How strict your filter
is will depend on your actual needs, but it should be borne in mind that
most obscenities are found in spam ("find a f*ck buddy tonight" kind of
stuff) and so a good spam filter will deal with most of them anyway. So
I'd question whether filtering inbound mail solely on profanity is worth
it (unless your users are children, in which case different rules apply)
- you're not going to be getting all that much which is offensive but
isn't spam, and that little you do receive is just something that your
users should be adult enough to put up with.
Finally, whatever method you choose to carry out the filtering, the
action taken should always be to block rather than substitute. Apart
from the fact that you have no right to edit the contents of someone
else's message just because you dislike some of the words in it, there
is a real danger that a misapplied filter will alter words it should not
in a way which materially affects the meaning of the message. Google for
'clbuttic' for examples, and, while you're at it, look up the
"Scunthorpe problem" for some other reasons why profanity filters are
very hard to get right.
Mark
--
Sent from my Babbage Difference Engine
http://mark.goodge.co.uk
http://www.ratemysupermarket.com
