The most people agree that work is the worst place for it to arrive.

The most people agree that work is the worst place for it to arrive. So how can you deal with it? That's where managed service providers such as MessageLabs come into the picture. The Minneapolis, Minn.-based firm, a provider of e-mail security services to guard against pesky or deadly bugs or viruses, claims some 20 percent of e-mail images are of the pornographic persuasion. This has increasingly become a problem in the workplace as scores of firms have had to fire employees or deal with sexual harassment lawsuits, all propagated by porn's position in e-mailboxes. This can only get worse as e-mailboxes, according to market research firm IDC, are getting fuller and fuller. IDC is projecting that e-mail traffic in the U.S. will top 9 billion messages per day by the end of 2003, and will balloon from 505 million in 2000 to 1.2 billion in 2005. Given these facts, MessageLabs has decided to go a step beyond the traditional anti-virus security (SkyScan AV) it offers to the enterprise with SkyScan AP (AP as in "anti-porn") for businesses, created in conjunction with software developer First 4 Internet. It's forged from the same mold as the company's SkyScan AV solution, but instead of picking out strains of Nimda or SirCam and intercepting offending emails at the Internet level, it picks out pornographic images. On a more broad level, MessageLabs Director of Marketing John Harrington told InternetNews.com that SkyScan reroutes e-mails to the company's global control towers in clusters where scanners armed with the company's patented Skeptic technology fish out illicit materials. SkyScan AP IDs offending e-mails, and subsequently blocks, tags or redirects them.