I just read this article over at the site formerly known as The Daily WTF.  It is about someone who worked for a government agency and couldn’t send e-mails to a client named Mr. Gookin, because the filtering system was flagging this as a racist e-mail.  Apparently “gookin” is a racial slur (I’ve certainly never heard it used).

This story doesn’t really surprise me, but what does surprise me is when I read some of the comments to the post, how many people have had the same thing happen.  And some of them are just completely ridiculous, like an e-mail containing the phrase “one group” because (if you remove the spaces) you can see the word “negro” in there (which I guess makes the United Negro College Fund a racist organization).  Or filtering out an e-mail containing the word “Saturday” (because of the “turd,” of course).  Or people with the name “Dick” that run into this problem all the time.  Or someone with the name “Callahan,” since that contains “Allah.”  Or the person who was involved with forensics, and frequently had e-mails to and from police departments filtered out (I guess it’s kind of hard to discuss a rape investigation without using offensive words like “rape” or “sex”).

What’s even worse than the stupidity of the filters is the refusal of many IT administrators to remove these words from the banned word list, even when it presents a problem to the employees.  And even when it prevents them from conducting business!

Fortunately I don’t have this problem at my office, otherwise I probably wouldn’t be able to exchange e-mails with Rakshit (that’s really the name of someone I work with).  But this kind of thing happens often enough that there is even a name for it: The Scunthorpe Problem, named after an incident in which AOL blocked mail from people living in Scunthorpe, England.  Follow the link if you’re not sure why...

I wonder if Spam Assassin blocks e-mails about Spam Assassin...