Blocking an individual email address

[Ted Mittelstaedt]

Jim,

  I would suggest you put an IP number block into your router
to deny outgoing SMTP destined to the mailserver she is using.

  But, frankly your really on legal thin ice here.  I'm guessing
her manager asked you to do this rather than confronting her
directly.  Probably because he's a bad manager who is scared of
confrontation.  The legal problem is that the second you do anything
you have just established that your company knew about the mail
diversion and chose not to confront her.

  I can tell you what happens in many of these cases.  The
employee gets around the block and continues to send mail home.
Eventually the lame-brained manager is forced to confront her
and tell her to knock it off or she will be fired.  She won't
stop doing it and she will get fired.  Then she will file a 
wrongful termination lawsuit against you, and in it she will
say that she was being singled out because the company knew she was
doing this for months and since they didn't confront her directly,
they approved what she was doing.  You guys will end up losing
and your going to pay her a lot of money.

  The best way to handle the problem is for the company to
have clear written guidelines that apply equally to all employees
that prohibit this.  You have your HR department release a set
of these to all employees.  Your lamebrained manager then shows
the employee the guidelines and says these are the new guidelines,
and henceforth if you violate them the penalties are spelled out.

  Without guidelines a court is going to say that since the
company didn't explicitly forbid it, and it wasn't illegal, that
the employee had a right to do it.

  Good luck!  I hope you end up figuring out how to block her
because nothing teaches better than doing it wrong and getting
burned.  This will be a good learning experience for you.  Just
remember that when these lawsuits blow up, that everyone involved
in a peripheral way within the company gets terminated, I
hope you don't get caught in it.

Ted


>-----Original Message-----
>From: owner-freebsd-questions at freebsd.org
>[mailto:owner-freebsd-questions at freebsd.org]On Behalf Of James Csoka
>Sent: Wednesday, February 15, 2006 7:52 AM
>To: freebsd-questions at freebsd.org
>Subject: Blocking an individual email address
>
>
>I am running a FreeBSD 5.4p10 machine at my office.  It 
>functions as our firewall and mailserver.  I am running 
>Mailscanner, which invokes sendmail when necessary to process 
>mail.  Sendmail is not started by default....Mailscanner 
>invokes individual instances of it when it needs to.
>
>Here is my problem.  I have an employee at my office that is 
>sending work email to her home email address.  I need to find a 
>way to block her email address, whether To, From, Cc, Bcc, or 
>whatever, from passing through my mailserver.  I have already 
>added a line to /etc/mail/access  (in the format  
>email at address.com      REJECT), and have run makemap hash 
>/etc/mail/access.db < /etc/mail/access.     I tested this with 
>my personal email address (external to my network), and it had 
>the effect of blocking any email orginating from my personal 
>email to any address at my work, however it does not prevent me 
>from sending emails to this address from a work address, which 
>is the whole point.
>
>Does anyone have any ideas?  I could tag the address as spam, 
>but I would rather not.  There has to be a way to block anyone 
>from sending to a certain email address, I would think.
>
>Any help would be appreciated.
>
>-Jim
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