Sunday the New York Times printed a nice article about email privacy and monitoring, “The Risk Is All Yours in Office E-Mail”
Most of it is common sense, or should be by now. When you use your company’s email system, do not expect any privacy for your messages.
It is their system; it is their domain; they own it and maintain it; in the U.S. companies can monitor all email if they have policies in place indicating they may monitor messages; do not do stupid things with email.
Do not send threatening messages, love letters, spoofed messages to look like they came from your CEO, messages that are illegal or used in commiting a crime (which of course you shouldn’t do any way), or any of an infinite number of things that employees have actually done with email messages.
Also it is not a good idea trying to use your web-based personal email accounts (Gmail, Yahoo, MSN, etc.) from your company’s network; Internet transmissions can also be monitored.
Tags: awareness and training, email security, government, Information Security, IT compliance, surveillance, workplace privacy