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The survey was conducted amongst 715 professionals from the UK's seven largest employment sectors: accountancy, the civil service, financial services, legal, retail, manufacturing and IT by SurfControl, a filtering and content management company.
The company claimed the results of the survey showed IT workers are comparatively reluctant compared to workers in other sectors to consider the damage a racist, sexist, adult or discriminatory email could create for a company's reputation.
The survey also showed 66 per cent of those who forwarding on potentially offensive emails acknowledged that personal comments or material sent from their work email addresses were the equivalent, in legal terms, of writing and posting a message on the companies' letterhead paper.
Steve Purdham, MD of SurfControl, said: "All Internet content that enters, circulates and leaves any company's network carries a risk. The results from our survey are genuinely startling. It is clear that businesses face a real challenge in educating IT staff of the risk email misuse poses, whilst IT staff, in reality, should know better.
"The first step is for the HR department to devise an 'Acceptable Use Policy,' communicating to all employees as to what constitutes appropriate and inappropriate email use. The next step is to involve the IT department in looking at ways in which sophisticated filtering technologies can minimise the corporate risk attached to harmful and unnecessary Internet content and help to enforce the company's policy."
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Richard Powell, © Shout99.com 2002
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