an actual email exchange

At work, our company uses a spam filter to help cut down on junk mail. This email was sent from an outside user to someone inside our company after they discovered our filter had blocked their email. He sent it to the original intended recipient, and cc'ed it to her manager, and the IT distro group.

You need to tell your IT guy to get a life. They seem to be to busy running around trying to justify there own existence playing big brother, and interfering in normal e-mail traffic.
All e-mail that leaves ***** is scanned by Symantec Internet Security (2006 edition).
[name deleted]
[company deleted]
[phone deleted]
--
------ Forwarded Message
From:
Date: Thu, 01 Dec 2*** 07:53:50 -0800
To: <*****@*****.com>
Cc: <*****@*****.com>
Subject: Your email message was blocked

The following email message was blocked by MailMarshal:

From: *****@*****.com
To: *****@*****.com
Subject: FW: JUST FOR YOU !!!!!!!!!!!
Message: B438f1c8c0000.000000000001.0001.mml

Because it contains a sound file.

If you believe the message is business related, please contact *****@*****.com and request that the message be released. If no contact is made within 5 days the message will be automatically deleted.

MailMarshal Rule: Content Security (Inbound) : Block SOUND Files

NetIQ MailMarshal
Email Content Security

------ End of Forwarded Message

So I replied to him using our admin account:

From: Administrator
Sent: Thursday, December 01, 2*** 9:48 AM
To: *****
Cc: *****
Subject: RE: Your email message was blocked

It would seem that your own company's IT staff have taken certain precautions with emails by using Symantec.

Our company also has certain policies that we follow to protect our users from viruses, worms, trojans, and spam. As you can imagine, we receive a lot of mail and therefore cannot inspect each one ourselves, so we use automation to do so. Certain email types fall into the category that tends to contain the aforementioned threats.

Examples of these types of emails are those that:
contain the text string 'FW:' in the subject
contain multiple exclamation points in the subject
contain a sound file attachment
of course there are many others which, again, is why we use software automation to check our email.

If you feel that discarding some emails is "playing big brother", I suggest that you go for one week disabling your virus software, pop-up blocker, spyware blocker, spam filter, and double click on each and every attachment you receive. Perhaps then you would feel differently about the existence of IT.

If, in fact, your email with the subject of "FW: JUST FOR YOU !!!!!!!!!!!" was "normal e-mail traffic" pertaining to business between ***** and *****, we will be more than happy to release the email from our quarantine.