Don’t be a bad boy on company time
Many people use their job e-mail for private things. It may seem completely innocent, but e-mail isn’t completely private. What may seem innocent in the beginning, may end up anything but.
Many of these examples are true stories.
What if you send a racy proposition to some business associate, and manage to misspell his address… That mail may end up somewhere it’s not supposed to be. If you’re lucky, it’ll bounce back to you, but you may not be that lucky.
What if you send a love note, and attach a file that gets stopped by some filters, or clog up the server? A note may get sent to you, but also to the admin, who even gets a copy of the entire mail…
Let’s say the boss sacks you for some offense, and decides to find out what you used company e-mail for. If you’ve been a really bad boy, the server logs alone will give the boss an idea of what you do with your free time. And forget about saying you only get spam. Good analysis will differentiate between spam and mail generated by a subscription.
Or even if you leave your job for another job. If there’s a lot of valuable incoming mail to your account, your old boss may decide to reroute your old e-mail address to a new employee, so no business contacts will be lost in the transition. If you’ve used that e-mail address for private stuff, it could get embarassing, if you forget to notify someone, or that someone is a bit forgetful…
And if you have your own e-mail address, don’t use the outgoing mailserver at work. Like I said, server logs are pretty specific about who you converse with.
Some companies keep and analyze logs of what you surf. They can’t tell what the contents of Hotmail, Gmail and Yahoo webmail is, though, without more invasive methods.
Just a little heads up.
Even if you don’t have anything to hide, separating company e-mail and private e-mail is a good rule of thumb, just in case you switch jobs or your company gets embroiled in legal action. Think about all those e-mails by Enron employees that have become public, even though some of those mails have nothing to do with the case!
April 8th, 2006 at 6:36 pm
In general I would recommend anyone to buy a private domainname with a POP3 box to make sure there is a life-long email address that never has to change (and allows full flexibility).
April 10th, 2006 at 3:07 am
The classic scenario is when users set up a filter to forward all company email to a private address (while they are on holiday or whatever). Then the private mailbox fills up and the server starts rejecting mail… each NDR generates another auto-forward response and before you know it the users mailbox is several Gb in size, often taking down an entire mail server affecting several hundred users.
April 10th, 2006 at 7:28 am
using your private email while at work could also be noticed by your boss - many admins log SYN packets to 25tcp ports, few are blocking outgoing 25ports and redirecting all mail to own smtp-proxy, which scans for viruses.
In January I had to setup catch-all address. The first mail that came into the mailbox was a monthly bank summary for our recent employee. I complained to the Bank - “how could this happen - my system was rejecting such emails with 550 User unknown for a year or so, don’t you have to check such bouncing mails and see why they are bounced?”. The answer was simple - “not our problem”.