Bloody buggering morons...

Once upon a time, there were things called third-party email clients. They were readily accessible by anyone and everyone was happy. Then mean people, known as bosses, decided that the potential risk of people downloading viruses, trojans, and worms was too great to allow people to use those 3rd party email clients, so they told their employees who liked checking their email at work to go fuck themselves. This made many people unhappy, and had the totally expected side effect of people being pissed off enough to try to find ways around this no 3rd party email idiocy.

There were two main ways of dealing with this new no-email scenario, the non-techy way and the techy way. Non-techy people were still capable of figuring out that they could get their 3rd party emails forwarded to their work email address, thus getting their emails. This was a really bad idea for a couple of reasons: 1) work addresses are easily read by those bosses so personal email via work is too easily read by other people 2) work email is usually Microsoft Outlook, also known as The Easiest Email Client To Get A Virus, Trojan, or Worm with, and therefore is a horrible idea. So by blocking third party emails, the bosses, also known as morons, basically guaranteed that Outlook would look at these emails and happily open the door for any kind of evil software that exists, thus shooting their stupid idea in the foot, the face, you name it.

The techy way to deal with the problem was to find interesting technological ways around the blocks. Most people don't know this, but there are actually two main ways for websites to talk to their readers: HTTP and HTTPS. Now that S on HTTPS means secure; it's a different protocol and one that isn't often blocked because blocking sites that are already secure could be viewed as idiocy. As such, many third party email clients still had HTTPS sites up that had not been blocked by bosses/morons. The techy people, knowing that these secure email clients had all sorts of protections against viruses and whatnot, used these HTTPS sites, secure (ha!) in the knowledge that they were both getting to keep their email and also doing their boss/morons a solid by protecting the company from being raped by the evils of the Internet.

Sadly, even the morons eventually caught on to the HTTPS sites, and tried to block them. This didn't bother the non-techy people who were busily filling their companies with viruses; only the techy people started getting boned by morons. Techy people, however, thrive in the face of adversity. Now there are a few new options depending on the tech available for those poor email deprived types, and few of them are good for the company.

1) Email on my phone! Many phones are now also capable of surfing the mobile net, meaning people can check and reply to their email on their phones. Why is this bad for the company? Simple. Assuming average people have an average typing speed of 30 words per minute, rather slow, an email could take a couple minutes to write. Now try that on your cellphone. If you're fast, and I mean fast, you might manage 30 wpm. More realistically you might get 5-10 wpm out of that tiny little keyboard. That's tripling or more the time it takes to reply to an email, thus hurting productivity. This also cannot be blocked unless you're willing to wrap your entire building with copper to block all cellphones, which you can't do because of work-only or on-call cellphones. Good call morons.

2) Remote access to my home machine. Though not entirely safe for the home user, it is relatively easy to set up a way for your home machine to be accessible via the internet, be that by Remote Desktop or another cool method of proxy, you now have access to your machine at home. Not only that, you have access to a machine that doesn't have a single business restriction, meaning you can email, IM, even IRC without problems. You can also browse the Internet for anything, midget pr0n if you were so inclined. Say goodbye to your work productivity. True here as well, this cannot be blocked because of the business use of Remote Desktop. Again: good call morons.

The simple, obvious, better, and just plain nicer answer here is: don't be pricks, let people check their 3rd party email for five minutes. It's safer, smarter, better for productivity, and keeps people happy.

I'm not holding my breath.