e-low, e-low, e-low
Just don't e-mail us about anything...
For most people, contacting the police is a simple thing. If you have an emergency it’s 999, if not you ring your local police station and leave a message which then gets deleted. Simples.
Not so if you work for local government. Today I got an e-mail from our ICT team telling me that my special e-mail account will be set up soon. Upon further investigation I discovered that this was a special e-mail account specifically to talk to the Met police.
Apparently colleagues have been having all of their e-mails to their police based counterparts blocked because – wait for it – they get sent via the internet. This means they are not secure, and that only those sent through a special type of e-mail account will get through to them.
So; if I want to e-mail anyone else in the world I simply fire up Outlook, write an e-mail and send it. If, however, I want to e-mail the Met police I have to close down Outlook, log off that entire profile (closing down everything else I’m working on at the time), log on under a new, ‘special’ profile, fire up Outlook again, write it and send it. Unless I get an instant response I’ll then have to close it all down again, load up my normal profile, get back to work for a bit and repeat the procedure later on to see if I’ve got a reply.
Am I alone in thinking this is ridiculous?
I know that they police handle sensitive data and need to be secure, but surely there is a simpler, more elegant solution than this? And what if I want to e-mail them but don’t work for a Council – how on earth would I get one of these special accounts so my message will be received.
In this modern age I refuse to believe that this isn’t a problem which is being over-thought by over-zealous officers and over-selling software developers with an over-engineered solution which does more harm than good.
Although if it stops the spread of LOL cat e-mails perhaps it’s not all bad.
Explore posts in the same categories: We love the CouncilTags: barriers, communications, e-mail, police, what the?!
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We Love Local Government 
October 26, 2010 at 7:41 pm
How do I create another profile? The only profile the council allows me to use is the one logon profile the council has allocated to me. This is just another example of brain-dead remote-access admin people assuming that everybody who could ever want to access their services actually owns and has administrator control over the physical hardware they use.
October 27, 2010 at 9:48 am
True! However, here we are all having this done for us by IT. And to top it all off, on reading through the e-mail it actually says right at the bottom that in a while there will be a fee for doing this – they don’t know how much though.
So they are setting something up without my consent in order to make my life more complicated and will then charge me for the privilege?!
Thanks!