Pr3++yG33kyTh1ng

This morning I'm posting a bit of tech-related advice.
This advice is platform independent, so Mac users and Windows users should be equally able to benefit from it. Linux guys . . . Maybe.
Yesterday the Bounced Mail folder caught an email from one user in our company to another. The problem came when the mail was rejected because the second person (a former employee) had a disabled account.
Then we noticed the email contained attachments in total over 10MB. This is large for an email, but well within the limits for internal mail.
But what could one user send to another by email that couldn't be shared on the web portal or the company FTP drive?
Apparently, naked pictures of Pamela Anderson.
Since we'd been discussing the email out loud, we had no choice but to notify management. Even if we'd been given a choice, I'd have reported it. Who wants a co-worker dumb enough to do that? No telling what else they'd do.
Of course, I don't want to get anyone fired. That isn't my thing. I'm more a sock-full-of-dimes-in-a-darkened-parking-garage kind of guy, but once this kind of thing happens it is always up to management how far it goes. Non-technically, it is out of our hands.
Regardless, I suggested that, to be fair, pictures of Pamela Anderson with clothes on are pretty tough to find online.
Management was considerably less amused than I was about that.
So. The tech tip for the day seems pretty basic but apparently some people need it:
Don't mail pr0n to or from a corporate email account. Seriously.
Automated systems find it and tell us about it. Millions of dollars have been spent developing ways to check the contents of email for just about everything.
I know this leads to a very obvious question:
"If I can't use my corporate email account, how can I distribute my pr0n collection over teh interwebs?"
Um, yeah.
Gmail, maybe?
Set up a server at home (not on the DMZ in a corporate network like some people at a place where I used to work)?
Just call your pr0n buddy on a cellphone and describe the pictures in lurid detail?
Burn the files to CD and USPS them Media Mail for next to nothing to your regular holiday mailing list?
Hey, you can even steal the blank disks from the office.
Geeks don't generally count the blank media.
We do notice when you drop pr0n on the mail server in the middle of the day.
Okay.
The problem is that anyone who has read this far would never make that mistake in the first place. If there is one thing to be said about regular readers of this blog it is this: They know how and how not to distribute pr0n.