This has nothing to do with preventing people from talking about non-work topics and is entirely about silencing people who protest the ethically questionable (at best) actions the company makes in relation to said country. Not only that, but they involved themselves in politics by selling to organizations that are entirely involved with politics.

Edit: I would love to hear your rebuttal, rather than just downvoting everybody who has replied to you with no written response. It sounds like you have none otherwise.

Being against your work supporting genocide seems pretty work-related to me. At best, it'll just destroy their company culture (not that I'm convinced it's good to start with). Optimistically, I hope everyone who's hard to replace quits and finds a better job somewhere that cares about more than infinite financial growth.

Nah, because they aren't blocking words on the other side, this is clearly targeting one specific thing they don't like.

Nobody is using their email for personal stuff. And Microsoft is actively working with the Israeli government, so it's not like protests against it are unwarranted.

Unless there are those who need certain words for their jobs, I can kinda understand why Microsoft wouldn't want emails from work addresses to go out with political agendas... for either side.

Sure. Then block both sides, and not only the one not bringing you money.

Work emails should just be about work. Too many people use their work emails like a personal email... with their banking, shopping, etc. That's what personal email addresses are for.

No one uses their company email for their personal banking, simply for the reason because if you'd leave, you'd lose your access, and since most companies run behind firewalls, vpns, 2fa tokens and similar additional credentials, it's simply harder to use.

This policy should go for many non-work related topics too. IT can unblock the words for certain users who need to use them for their job.

Of course, let's waste resources to maintain idiotic blocklists that are out of date the moment they are rolled out, and additional resources to make the blocklist actually work. Palestine, p4lestine, pale s tine, p a l e s t i n e, paleztine. Need more?

You're not at work for someone with this kind of unhinged mentality watching you working for 8 hours a day straight with no breaks and no distractions. You're there to get your work done. In my current team, we've had the best ideas talking about our problems at the coffee machine. I personally focus best when I have music on. We're doing sports together once a week on a company fitness incentive, which boosted our team dynamic massively. None of this would be possible in such a controlled environment.

Personal email? I haven’t gotten a personal message over email in almost a decade.

“Emailing large numbers of employees about any topic not related to work is not appropriate. We have an established forum for employees who have opted in to political issues,” says Microsoft spokesperson Frank Shaw in a statement to The Verge. “Over the past couple of days, a number of politically focused emails have been sent to tens of thousands of employees across the company and we have taken measures to try and reduce those emails to those that have not opted in.”

Work email is a tool provided by the company to be used for work topics. Some employees are apparently using this tool to send unrelated emails to people who didn't sign up for it, but still have to deal with it somehow because they are probably required to check their email.

The company trying to reduce this seems reasonable to me, I'm surprised that so many people seem to take offense at it.