Wash that e-mail message out with soap!

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An innocent attempt to send, via e-mail, a portion of a magazine profile on WPP’s Martin Sorrell to HSBC’s Peter Stringham was greeted with an electronic body-slam last week. Why? “Bad language and/or profanity,” explained HSBC’s prissy e-mail server in London.

At first blush, the rejection seemed preposperous. The 3,000-plus-word Fortune piece (the link goes to an excerpt—you need a subscription to read the whole thing) largely applauded Sorrell’s success at grabbing market share, be it through pitches for global clients like HSBC or acquisitions like Cordiant and Grey.

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