Nearly ten percent of companies have fired an employee for violating corporate blogging or message board policies, and 19 percent have disciplined an employee for the same infractions, according to a new survey from Proofpoint, a messaging security company.

Almost a third of companies "employ staff to read or otherwise analyze outbound email," while more than fifteen percent have hired people whose primary function is to spy on outgoing corporate email. A quarter have fired an employee for violating corporate email policies. Twenty percent of the companies and almost thirty percent of companies with more than 20,000 employees had been ordered by a court or a regulator to turn over employee emails.

Enterprises continue to express a high level of concern about creating, managing and enforcing outbound messaging policies (for email and other communication protocols) that ensure that messages leaving the organization comply with both internal rules, best practices for data protection and external regulations. […] The growing popularity of new electronic communication channels (such as webmail, blogs, media sharing sites and instant messaging) pose new sources of risk for IT security professionals and the organizations they serve.

I have doubts that this many companies have actually fired employees for message board or blog postings, but that’s just a gut, Chertoff-style, danger-dog hunch. If anything, I’d guess the two categories are lumped together, because despite the hype around blogs, I think people are more likely to say something stupid on a message board.

Proofpoint, a vendor that sells message monitoring equipment, also has a vested interest in having companies perceive that they need to be monitoring their employees. That doesn’t make the survey flawed, but it’s certainly in the interests of security vendors to keep the perceived threat level high.

And for those of you want to use private email at work, either tunnel out or use a online email service that lets you conduct the whole session, not just the login, via https. You can do this with Gmail by logging in at https://mail.google.com. If you want to privately IM, look for a client like Pidgin or Apple’s iChat that enables encrypted instant messaging. (I know THREAT LEVEL readers know this already).

The company’s fourth annual survey was conducted by Forrester Consulting, which polled 308 U.S. companies with more than 1,000 employees. The report, slated for a Monday release, can be found on the web here.