Out of Office Message and Privacy Risks

I remember as a child my parents used to have an answering machine.  For those of you too young to remember those, they were basically like voicemail, except they plugged in to the wall.  I remember at some point my parents changed the message from "we are not home right now" to "we can't take your call right now".  I remember the explanation was that if you said "we are not home right now", a criminal would know you weren't home, but the other message might give them pause.  My parents did not lock the doors, by the way, so I do not think an answering machine message would deter them.  I suppose I can see not wanting to say "we are out of the country from June 1 through June 10", but do you really confuse criminals by saying "we can't take your call right now"?  I guess I never felt like it would be a deterrent.

The reason this came to mind is because as I mentioned I am going to be away from PCCC next year.  I am considering what to do with my out of office message.  By putting one out there, there is a slight risk of that information being used against the College.  A smart social engineer could in theory find a way to leverage that information.  However, the alternative is to check my work email, and I am in theory not supposed to when I am on leave.

We use Microsoft Exchange.  This will allow me to put up an out of office message.  I have the choice to reply only to people in the same domain (@pccc.edu) or only to people outside our domain (everyone else), or simply everyone.  Most people would just put up an out of office message saying to contact their department chair, but the problem is that by doing so, I open up two accounts for spam.  If a spammer sends an email that gets past the email filters, they will get a reply not only showing my email is active, but also giving the spammer my department chair's email address. 

I could also make it a little more complicated, for example, say email
person at pccc dot edu
(which would of course translate to person@pccc.edu)
...but some people would get confused with this.

Making matters more complicated is that I have some business contacts that I would like to be able to contact me.  If I want them to be able to find me, I should probably provide some sort of email address for them to use to contact me.  So, the end result is going to be me setting up a new email account, to protect my home account from spam, and an added risk to both my email address and my department chair's email address.

Now, to figure out what this message should say...

A Really NSFW Situation

NSFW stands for "not safe for work".  It is an abbreviation someone might use when sending an email with questionable content to a friend, as in "check this out, but it is NSFW, so make sure you read it at home".

A few weeks ago, something that takes NSFW to a new level showed up in the news.  Two people who work at Cornell University were having an affair, and somehow, the guy just happened to copy the entire business school.

Now, leaving aside issues of whether this person was being self destructive and actually wanted to get caught or not, this is just awful.  Lesson learned here?  If you are going to have an affair, use your home email, not your work one.  Just remember, when you get a work email account, most companies reserve the right to read your email if they want to, because you are using their systems.  Also remember, they typically reserve the right to monitor your Internet, because after all, their computers and their Internet.

The site below has the entire email exchange, and I warn you now, it is NSFW.
http://guestofaguest.com/news/breaking/breaking-the-email-scandal-that-just-shook-cornells-campus/
(and yes, this was also reported on sites like Business Week, so it is legit...but on BW's site you need an account to read their full story)

Become a Gmail Ninja

Google's Gmail is a nice little email program, ignoring questions about privacy, of course. For example, there are ways to set it up so you can automatically filter things. If your email address is JuanPena@gmail.com, you can create "disposable email addresses". I could send email to JuanPena+dfkjhasdkjlhfldksj@gmai.com an it would still get to you. You could then give out one version of your email to your friends - the easy one - and use another one for Web sites you trust - and a third version for Web sites that you don't really want to have your email address, but you have to give them one for something.

The cool part is that you can then use Gmail's filtering system to automatically ignore anything sent to the junk version of your email address - so if someone emails JuanPena+spam@gmail.com, you could have that automatically put in to a garbage folder, or you can have it deleted automatically!

Obviously this is not something everyone can do easily. What Google decided to do is create the aforementioned Gmail Ninja site. They've divided things up in to four categories - basically, easy, medium, hard, and really complex - and this way, based on the skill level you select, it will show you tips.

I like this idea because there are plenty of Gmail help sites out there...and Google has taken ownership of it and organized it in a logical way.

http://www.google.com/mail/help/tips.html