Email snooping: The good, the bad and ugly

This week the issue of email snooping has been back in the news.

While some techies have angrily denied ever snooping on their colleagues' email just for the sake of it, others have admitted it has become an integral part of their job - and it seems the practice is widespread across UK.

Many companies advertise the fact that they monitor personal email use. Most automate the process and are only concerned with the protection of company secrets and company servers. Many are also keen that their staff should be pulling their weight.

Many of the emails we have received from IT managers cite examples of people abusing the system with constant personal emails, some extreme examples even mention obscene emails which became a matter for the police because of their severity. In such cases it is not uncommon that disciplinary action is taken. Very few people would argue with such action as long as the email and internet usage policy is clearly communicated to staff prior to their transgression.

But this is far from a one-sided debate. In terms of moral culpability, a member of staff who abuses email privileges isn't even on the same scale as one company which was brought to our attention.

An anonymous reader told us: "In a previous role as a head of IT, I was asked to snoop on email as a way of kerbing union activity."

Such an admission instantly sets alarm bells ringing. For all the reasonable motives suggested for monitoring staff emails, such a clear abuse by a company makes you question the real underlying reasons for their vigilance.

Major US companies in particular have traditionally taken a very dim view of union involvement and their efforts to quash it have always been shrouded in the kind of cloak and dagger activity that can seriously dent the reputation of a firm if exposed. It's the ugly side of business which companies invest in heavily in order to keep secret.

One other reader told us the only emails his company doesn't monitor, by order of the management, are those between union reps and their union - realising it just isn't worth the trouble it could cause.

We certainly didn't expect to uncover such a revelation so easily when looking into this issue. We expected to hear more from anonymous readers tipping us off about gossip harvesting in the server room. And at least one reader didn't disappoint:

"In my last job the IT manager called all his techies one by one very secretly into the server room and they all came out again stifling giggles. When it was my turn I found out that the cause of the amusement was the mailbox of a member of staff who'd just left.

"He'd been going through her mailbox before deleting her account to forward any important mail. He'd stumbled across a quite graphic series of emails describing her experiments in lesbianism with a friend."

But even this is wrong. Isn't it? The actions of the IT manager started off well within his remit. He was merely carrying out his job, doing his former colleague a favour even, by forwarding her mail, but he - and it's just a guess that it was a he - eventually had to give in to the dark voices in all of us that say 'go on, that's worth sharing with your mates' upon discovering some salacious piece of gossip.

It's a lot less harmful than crushing the unions but it will probably still make most if us think twice about hitting send next time we craft a personal email.

But underpinning this whole argument is an issue which clearly divides people into two polar camps: If you use your company's email system to send messages unrelated to work, then you are setting yourself up for a fall one way or another.

Discuss.

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