Graphic images appearing unbidden on PCs by way of e-mail in-boxes could qualify as evidence of a "hostile work environment," something that's prohibited by federal employment law.

As a result, porn spam could begin to crop up in sexual harassment complaints from employees offended by the material. Even if companies aren't the source of such messages, they could be liable for hefty civil fines if managers know that porn spam is a problem and don't move to address it.

"You have to provide a workplace that's free of sexual harassment. That right is so clearly established that no employer could say, 'I didn't know I had to do that,' if they're on notice about sex spam," said Michael Modl, an attorney who specializes in workplace harassment claims at the Madison, Wis., law firm of Axley Brynelson.

The legal arguments have not yet been tested in court, but scholars say the combination of lucrative damages and porn spam's steadily increasing volume will make lawsuits drawing on at-work porn spam inevitable. Statistics compiled by analysts at antispam-software company Brightmail show that pornographic solicitations represent the fastest-growing category of unwanted e-mail ads, doubling as a percentage of spam in the last few years.

Many of those messages come with images linked to outside Web sites, images that are displayed automatically in the preview panes of popular e-mail clients such as Microsoft's Outlook, potentially exposing even cautious e-mail users to offensive pictures and to various security issues. Microsoft has said it plans to tweak the image default settings in a pending version of Outlook to prevent pictures from showing up on a computer screen without the consent of the user. The move is necessary to curtail spam, the company said, without specifically mentioning porn.

Such tweaks may help, but the most obvious response to porn spam is to filter out messages that appear to be sexually explicit. Products that do precisely that have fueled a growth industry during the last few years, with approaches ranging from sifting through incoming messages for phrases known to be used by porn spammers to performing statistical analyses on e-mail text to blocking transmissions from a blacklist of known or suspected spammers.

Serious consequences
Companies face a legal duty to take action as a result of federal civil rights laws dealing with sexual discrimination. U.S. law says that it is illegal for employers to discriminate against employees based on their "race, color, religion, sex or national origin."

Courts have interpreted that broadly, ruling that sexual comments can contribute to a work environment that a reasonable person would deem hostile. In a 1993 case titled Harris v. Forklift Systems, the U.S. Supreme Court concluded that for a workplace to be illegal, "the environment would reasonably be perceived, and is perceived, as hostile." Lower courts have placed the sexual harassment classification on job titles such as "foreman" and "draftsman," on off-color jokes and cartoons displayed in the workplace and on "misogynistic rap music" audible to coworkers.

Employers face serious penalties if they don't remove such things from the working environment. People who have been subjected to harmful work settings can sue for up to $300,000 in compensatory and punitive damages, if the company has more than 500 employees.

Sponsoring software- Snitch

Snitch is a drive cleaner tool created to help cleanup hard discs of offensive images, movies, internet history and other illicit files. Snitch can perform a hard drive picture search, identifying files that contain nudity, and then perform tasks such as deleting history, as well as other porn scan operations in the process of cleaning hard drives. Other disk cleaner tools do not offer all the functions of internet history cleaner and general system cleaner , and they therefore cannot clean disks and leave your computer with a completely clean drive.

Snitch uses 'intelligent', adaptive algorithms to search hard drive space and clean your computer of adult games, free adult movies and various other adult entertainment files. Skin color analysis along with other techniques make Snitch the porn scanner that is ideally suited to remove adult content.

Snitch is a software tool that is designed to cleanup disk drives and to cleanup computer storage devices of adult content. Snitch has deletion algorithms capable of deleting files, deleting internet history, deleting adult pornography and leaving you with a clean hard disk. This prevents the necessity of erasing the hard drive completely and reinstalling an operating system. Therefore a clean computer can be achieved without a full re-install. In this way Snitch performs the functions of porn eraser, hard drive cleaner, internet cleaner, and a general PC cleaner. Clean up your hard drives with Snitch software.

Snitch provides a free demo for users to test the software for themselves. This free porn remover demo allows users to try out Snitch before paying, to see if it performs as they expect it to.