Filtering Out Blow Jobs at Aliant

The following email from inside Aliant showed up in our support mailbox here this morning, the result of our nightly City Cinema mailing (email addresses obfuscated to protect the innocent):

Aliant's Content Filtering Device (an automated content monitoring gateway) has 
stopped the following email for the following reason:

It believes it may contain unacceptable language, or inappropriate material.

   Message: B00ae5df48.00000001.mml
   From:    XXXXXX@isn.net
   To:      XXXXXX@aliant.ca
   Subject: CITY CINEMA schedule for Wednesday, February 28, 2007

Please remove any inappropriate language and send it again.

The blocked email will be automatically deleted after 5 days.

Aliant's Content Filtering Device: 
Content Security (Inbound) : Block Unacceptable Language
Script Offensive Language (Basic) Triggered in Body
Expression: blow job* Triggered 1 times weighting 5
Script Offensive Language (Extensive) Triggered in Body
Expression: blow job* OR blowjob* Triggered 1 times weighting 60

It delights me to think that it’s someone’s job at Aliant to maintain the list of topics that Aliant employees shouldn’t read about in their email. I’d pay real money for a copy of the regular expression list. Do you think they have weekly team meetings — “Bob, we’ve had an upsurge in blow job traffic and we’ve really got to slap a filter on that…”

By the way, the offending text came from the description of Sleeping Dogs Lie, which contained, in part:

The story of a young woman, Amy who confides in her fiancé‚ the darkest and most shameful secret in her sexual past - that once, in college, bored and curious, she gave her dog a blow job - Sleeping Dogs had the potential to be a Kevin Smith-style raunchfest, which would have been funny, but not nearly as affecting as Goldthwait’s take.