Is Your Work Email Really Yours?

Do you typically email your significant other at least half a dozen times during the average workday? Most of the time, these messages are one line gripes about the drudgery of our jobs, occasional amusing stories about how our day is going, and sometimes a brief steamy or romantic thought that we want to share with each other. Harmful behavior to anyone? Nope. Detrimental to job productivity? Not really. We only email when we have a free moment or two. Dangerous to us? Not so far.

I say not so far because if you do this using your work email accounts, read on.... Millions of people have an email account provided as part of their job. Almost everyone uses a work email account to communicate with coworkers, clients, vendors, or others for work-related tasks. However, almost everyone also uses them to email friends, family, lovers, and other random people. Is there anything wrong with that practice? That’s up to the employer and IT department.

However, it is worth considering that many companies maintain the legal right to monitor employee emails. This gives the IT department the legal right to read any email an employ receives or, perhaps more importantly, sends. And for what it’s worth at least one or two members of any IT depart have the ability to monitor email regardless of whether they have been granted permission. This is why when job hunting, it’s a good idea to not use a work email account. (Even Hotmail and such can be monitored as the IT department can view the messages with software that most of them have... by the way...ALL pictures are saved to the local hard drive and also on the server ...in the IT room!..suitable for easy viewing... this I know as I and another administrator were monitoring a senior executive's surfing habits - can you say "dangerous"? Sure! I knew you could!). The first clue is the clicking of the server hard drives when logging on for the day... remember your profiles are stored on the server, and have to be loaded on your machine! Oh, and don't even get me going if your company uses either Citrix or Windows Terminal Server! (The logon screen will tell you that.)

Is this right, fair, or just? We can debate that endlessly. Suffice it to say that there is a privacy issue at stake. However, it is a work-related email account being accessed on a company-owned computer. And the practice should be stated (if only in fine print up front). But more importantly, the fact is that this is common practice.

What’s the moral of this tale? Think before you use your work email account out of convenience. Would you be comfortable with your boss or someone else in your company reading the email you plan to write? In my case, I can easily say that I would (because I've worked in the IT department and know the people who are capable of monitoring my email, and because I live in a country that has made it illegal to fire someone on the basis of sexual orientation... but they will fire you for 'miss-using company email!). Don't say that you haven't been warned.