I Think Someone's Missing the Point

My sister sent me an email at work not long ago. Her language wasn't entirely clean. I don't know exactly what she said. I'm sure it wasn't meant to be offensive, but I missed the context because our filters at work screened out the email.

Now, I have no objection to that. Short of having a human being reviewing filtered mail, the only way to really make it work is to create lists and screen out forbidden words. And if a business wants to make a hard and fast rule against curse words in company email, there's nothing unreasonable about this.

Here's the thing: although I don't know what my sister's email said, I do know that the forbidden word she used was "bitch".

I know this because the filtering program clipped it and sent it to me. That's right--all of the clean, innocuous words were blocked. All of the context was eliminated. But I did receive a notification in which the word "bitch" was prominantly displayed in a graphics box.

So. Good thing they protected me from all those OTHER words, hm?