Don't Curse Now: E-mails Monitored by Employers for Language

July 30, 2010— -- You'd think we'd have figured it out by now: When it comes to e-mail, unless you're prepared to see your words plastered across the front page of a newspaper, just don't do it.

But, despite a steady stream of electronic scandals, the list of the world's worst e-mails continues to grow.

This week, Goldman Sachs made headlines for banning curse words in work e-mails. According to the Wall Street Journal, the financial giant, which suffered major e-mail headaches in the aftermath of the financial meltdown, told employees filtering softwware would stop them from using profanities in e-mails.

Even creative substitutes (for instance, with asterisks in place of four-letter words) are out of bounds, the report said.

But Goldman Sachs is hardly the only company to crack down on corporate e-mail. And as employers become more vigilant about monitoring what goes in and out of company servers, e-mail policy and etiquette experts say it wouldn't hurt employees to think a bit more carefully before they hit "send."

"We have come some distance and we are getting better at this, both individually and in our companies… but, boy, do we have a long way to go," said Will Schwalbe, the co-author of "Send: Why People Email So Badly and How to Do it Better," who has since started Cookstr.com. "This technology came on us so quickly and so massively that, as individuals and companies, we just weren't prepared for it."

It's a good sign that companies like Goldman Sachs are getting serious about e-mail, he said, but controlling profanity is just a start.

"People shouldn't be under illusions that just because you don't use swear words, you won't get caught doing stupid things on e-mail," he said.

When contacted by ABCNews.com, a Goldman Sachs spokesman said its e-mail surveillance program isn't new but has just been "broadened."

"We've always had a policy about the appropriate use of language and appropriate behavior, more generally. That policy was in place and has been in place for a long time and is unchanged," he said. "What we have done is updated the surveillance program, much like dictionaries get updated."