Fighting spam can take many forms. One drastic method is banning internal email altogether.
That's exactly what the CEO of a French IT company has done, saying that the company's 74,000 employees working in 42 countries will have to eschew emailing coworkers in favor of instant messaging, a Facebook-like interface, or plain old face-to-face (which could include teleconferencing, of course).
Why? Spam, apparently.
The company says that of the 200 email messages each employee receives, on average, each day, the percentage of spam is higher than that of business-related (18 to 10). To fix that, the company is on an 18-month journey into email withdrawal. The policy is six months old, and progress is such that the number of internal emails has dropped by 20 percent.
A company spokesperson clarified that the target was internal emails, not emails to clients. This would suggest that the move has more to do with using internal technology — which would not be accessible to spambots. Still, it's a bold move to make for the head of an IT company.
This CEO is Thierry Breton, of the company Atos. A former finance minister, he cheerfully announced that he has not sent one email since becoming the CEO in late 2008. He expects his employees to (eventually) follow that example.
No comments:
Post a Comment