The uses and abuses of email have been in the news a lot lately but iDesk has discovered a newish twist in the tale, quite probably to its cost. Laying off 100+ employees may have saved it some money but the online forum they set up to slag the company off could threaten iDesk's whole business.

iDesk supplies technical support to a number of large UK ISPs, a service in which quality and reliability are presumably key requirements. So how do you react when employees laid off by your supplier accuse the company of providing customers with misleading performance statistics, low and decreasing technical capability, nepotism and tolerating a drug culture? It's not good for business, that's for sure.

The accusations don't end even there, or even with the laid-off employees; former employees have joined in the act to apparently publicly destroy the company's credibility. Human relations in iDesk were allegedly a disaster area, with one complainant wondering what a bonding workshop earlier in the year was supposed to be all about, when technical staff were being laid off in favour of more layers of management staffed by friends of incumbents. The current lay-offs are just the latest, following on from similar action in March and April.

Damaging as this must be to iDesk's future business, that company's fate is not our concern here. The question is: is such ex-employee' action likely to become common in the future and is there anything companies in similar situations (but perhaps better shape) can do to prevent it? Not, you understand, that it is any concern of ours to inhibit the truth about company management being revealed but the possibilities for unjustified damage are all too obvious.

Many companies take care to prevent such possibilities as registering of companynamesucks.com but the iDesk case is rather different. The ex-employee's forum title, iDesk The Truth, could even have been thought up by the company's own PR, assuming the truth were palatable. Something similar happened even before the Dotcom era, when Ingres was taken over by CA. Staff laid off or walking out anyway emailed anyone who would listen with the