I've just seen something amazingly dumb.

And as an administrator of an email/groupware platform, I'm wondering whether it's down to stupidity or a lack of training.

Some quick background - there's a guy named PZ Myers, who's a professor at the University of Minnesota. He's a prominent atheist blogger, and he wrote recently about a story in which the Eucharist was interrupted by someone stealing the sacrament.
Some prominent Catholics were offended by his writing, and began calling for his removal from the university.

Now, I don't want to get into the religious debate here. It's a distraction from my main point, which is that someone has sent him a death threat from their work address at 1-800-FLOWERS.

I just can't quite believe that in this day and age, someone would think it sensible to send a death threat from a corporate email address.

Not that it's ever acceptable to send a death threat, mind you. But if you're going to do it, then doing it from a newly signed up webmail account seems smarter.

Because right now, someone as 1-800-FLOWERS seems remarkably unaware that corporate mail systems are logging the emails that they send. Much less that there's a possibility that it may be being journalled for legal reasons.

I've long believed that, irregardless of how "easy to use" your mail system is, everyone should be trained in its use. Even if that training is "soft skills", such as when it's acceptable to reply to all, or how to avoid sending inappropriate emails.

Any company NOT doing that seems to just be opening itself up for some pretty nasty abuses of their email systems.

(And it doesn't have to be sit-down training. It could be a handout or an electronically delivered course.)

This is an extreme case, of course.

But as the old saying goes, ignorance of the law is no excuse. And ignorance of acceptable use should be the same. This particular threat will probably go nowhere, and hopefully it was just a heated moment of poor judgement.

But you've got to wonder whether it really was just stupidity - and whether or not a user trained to know that abusive emails should be reported might have had second thoughts about this.

I think we can all guess what my Show 'n' Tell Thursday this week might be:
Don't send death threats from your workplace.

I just can't believe that in 2008 someone might actually need that one spelling out to them...

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