[FW1] Opinion: Blocking hotmail, etc?

[ebrastow@FW1-NOSPAMautomatedemblem.com]

Pardon me for the cross-posts, I'm sending this to the NT Sys Admin list as
well as a Firewall-1 list in a quest for opinions.

Our company has recently become aware that some employees are bypassing our
email systems and using hotmail accounts to send personal email on work
time. This leaves us vulnerable to both the time lost in writing the emails,
as well as liable for content as hotmail sends the IP address of the source
computer along with the message, which would of course be traced back to our
company. 

We do have a written email policy that states, in part, that "Only
authorized email software may be used".

There is no business reason for us to allow access to hotmail, yahoo mail,
rocketmail, etc...

My question is, how many of you guys block access to such web sites, and how
do your users react to this? Would a user expect that access to such
personal email resources should be allowed at their workplace? 

Also, does there exist anywhere a good compilation of these sites that could
be used for blocking purposes?

Please feel free to email me personally so as not to clog the list with
opinions (unless others are interested, too?)

Thanks,

Evan


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