Email scanning in Sutton

Why we filter our messages:
The London Borough of Sutton operates an email service for Sutton schools, youth centres and other council interests. Most users of the suttonlea.org, sutton.sch.uk or other domains are children or young adults and their email service is subject to stringent filtering. This prevents the transmission of emails with certain types of content. Although you may consider this policy heavy-handed we hope that you will agree that the protection of children's email accounts is of prime importance.

No filtering system is ever 100% accurate or effective but we make every effort to monitor our system's performance and respond to any matters that arise. Our service incorporates multiple scanners that look for viruses, inappropriate language and adult images.

Inappropriate Language:	Words that would be inappropriate for young children such as swearing, offensive, racist or sexual terms. We scan in several languages
Spam:	Unsolicited bulk commercial email or email that the administrators have chosen to block from particular mailing lists that have no educational or business value.
Hoaxes:	Hoax "warnings" such as the jdbgmgr hoax that may cause alarm or waste time and resources.
Scams:	Items such as the Nigerian 419 scam. Scams are often based upon following a natural disaster such as Hurricane Katrina.
Phishing:	Emails intended to dupe users into revealing their personal banking details or other private information.
Chains:	Those purporting to "donate 3 cents" for every copy of a charity message forwarded; promising that something amazing will happen if your forward the message seven times; silly surveys etc. Please do not send chain messages of any type, even those concerning viruses or hoax warnings.
Marketing:	Advertising of products such as Viagra and similar drugs and get-rich-quick schemes.
Viruses, trojans and worms:	Programs seeking to infect or damage IT systems.
Certain file attachments:	Messages with certain types of attachments that could harbour viruses such as .com .exe .pif .scr .vbs .scr .shs and .mp3 music files which are frequently in breach of copyright and waste significant server resources.
Pornographic images:	Adult or potentially offensive images are blocked.

Message rejection notices:
When a message is sent or received that contains content that matches the list above it will be rejected and the sender will be advised that their message has not been delivered.

If you disagree with the filtering policy:
Users of our systems must comply with our Acceptable Use Policy (available on the Intranet). Messages should be education or business related. Recreational and personal messages should be kept to a minimum.

We hope that you will appreciate that protection of children's email accounts is our highest priority. Our services have a proven track record in protecting children from inappropriate material and in highlighting cases of child abuse and bullying. School management have elected to use the service because of the high level of protection offered.

If you believe a message was blocked in error:
Occasionally the filter may stop a legitimate message in error. This is unavoidable when systems are automated and handling around tens of thousands of messages per day. If you have trouble getting a legitimate message through please contact us enclosing full details of the message you sent and a copy of any automated response you have received.

Contacting us:
If you have read the information above and wish to enquire further about filtering please forward a complete copy of any message concerned to

If you have received an email from one of our users which you feel is offensive, abusive or otherwise of concern, please forward the full text of the email to

Include the header (the routing information at the top of the email) in the message. When forwarding the email please list your concerns. Please replace any potentially offending content with hash marks (#).