Corporate e-mail policy

[Anonymous]

I used to work for a company which had a surprisingly liberal policy about e-mail.The gist of it was:

    "Private e-mail will not be read by anyone other than the recipient. The
    only exceptions to this are:
        1) Systems personnel may examine mail messages to determine if the mail
           system is working correctly; [e.g., checking mail logs against users'
           mailbox contents to verify delivery]
        2) [basically said e-mail would be treated like any other system files
           in the event of a criminal investigation, etc.]"

The policy specifically required authorization from the line VP for either of these actions, and reinforced that the systems people were to treat the e-mail as administratively confidential data.

The only time I heard of anyone even asking for e-mail was when a project manager wanted a copy of a message that a sponsor sent to one of his subordinates, who was on vacation. The systems folks cited the policy, the line VP backed them up, and the manager went away empty-handed. (He wound up calling the subordinate at her hotel and browbeating her into authorizing the computer center folks to forward a copy of the message to the manager. But that's another story.)