This article is more than 1 year old

Cockney suits abuse f**king email

Gawd blimey guv'nor, yer firm's a bleedin' mess

It's taken 'em a while, but email security firm Clearswift has discovered that Londoners are the worst in the UK when it comes to effing and blinding in emails, using email to slag people off and binning emails they want to keep the lid on.

In fact yer average corporate Cockney Sparra comes out worse in every single email outrage category - except one.

The facts are these: one third of those currently occupying a desk space within the sound of Bow Bells admitted to giving it some verbals in their electronic communications, compared with just one fifth in the angelic North. Nineteen per cent have used email to criticise a colleague, and a cor blimey guv'nor 26 per cent are likely to delete an email they don't want to get into the wild. The national average for the latter misdemeanour is 16 per cent.

However, just one per cent of Pearly Suits say they have grassed someone up for abusing email, against a two per cent national average. Spot on.

There are also some age / gender differences to be gleaned from Clearswift's probe of 2,000 desk jockeys. Younger employees are five times more likely than their geriatric (over-50) colleagues to bang out emails they later regret - notably after a heavy night on the sauce.

And five per cent of geezers "admitted to deliberately emailing intellectual property or private information outside their company", whereas a paltry one per cent of chapesses 'fessed up to the activity.

Naturally, there's some mileage to be had out of this latter Defence of the Realm chiller stat, and Clearswift lead whistle Jon Lee warns: "This statistic is particularly concerning. There's a blatant disregard for the very information, which gives their employers competitive advantage and keeps the respondents in a job. Five percent might not sound like a lot but when you consider that this equals to 41 people in this research sample, that's potentially up to 41 businesses whose confidential information is being leaked to competitors. Imagine how large that figure could be when you look at the entire working population."

Yes, yes, we're working ourselves into a right two-and-eight just thinking about it. Jon continues: "Companies must ensure they have clearly-communicated email usage policies in place and deploy robust email filtering software to enforce them and to monitoring the huge amount of emails entering and leaving the organisation. Otherwise businesses are exposing themselves to the legal ramifications and acute embarrassment of costly leaks."

Lawks a mercy, gawd bless yer, Jon, but can you point us in the direction of a company which sells robust email filtering software? When you do suss it out, get on the trumpet and give us a bell down the rub-a-dub where we'll be fencing some moody intellectual property to a bloke called Vince the Face for a pony and a couple of Don Revvies. Ta, me old china. ®

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