E-mail is a wonderful and inexpensive way of sending a postcard that anyone in the entire world can potentially read! Just about anyone with technical savvy could intercept it along its route over multiple servers. They could be nosey, officially spying, downright malicious, or just doing their jobs as managers. - Rest assured there is only a small guarantee of privacy to e-mail, whether at home or at work. Unless you have permission from someone to encrypt an e-mail, and the tools to do it, a hacker can read anything you write. E-mail can be intercepted by government officials, and most certainly, it can be monitored and read by your companys IT department. - Most of us who are computer-literate could not live without our e-mail now. Everything of importance in our lives is linked through it, from family and friends to our professional networks. Most of us also know that e-mail at the office has additional rules and restrictions that the prudent employee will adhere to without whining: no jokes, no love notes, no spam, no personal anything may seem harsh, but their absence cuts the incidence of virus attacks to the minimum. - Employers make back-up copies of everything every night, either locally, or on remote data storage servers, or both. The process is an absolute must; it is critical to a businesss survival in the event of a disaster. Everything is backed up, including databases, documents, customer records, e-mails, and instant messaging systems. So be careful what you write, and where you send it. The results can be worse than being caught sailing paper airplanes across the room in school. - One feature of e-mail that many users are not familiar with is the bcc blind carbon copy (left over from typewriter days). bcc is not as innocuous as it seems. The sender selects bcc when he or she wants to surreptitiously send a copy of an e-mail message to someone, without any of the other recipients knowing about it. - If you select Reply All, bcc recipients will usually show up, depending on the e-mail system you are using, and any Reply All monitoring plug-in you might have installed. That is, unless the sender was savvy enough to lock down the e-mail. If it is thoroughly locked down, you wont be able to reply to the sender. In fact, you wont even be able to print out the e-mail for your own records. - Locking down e-mail is an act of absolute control/confidentiality from someone who is typically quite angry, yet fears consequences. It means that no one can respond, short of creating a separate e-mail, and even then, you wont easily be able to defend yourself to everyone (cc and bcc) that the sender notified. - Not that all is lost. There are ways of capturing the contents, which I will not list here. Heaven forbid that certain people should find out youre not as dumb as they think you are. (You can always check out a few technical sites.) If you cant get the e-mail through simple means, an attorney can go after it for you later on, if you can provide the date, and who sent it at which company. - In any event, make notes and keep them at home. Even truculent managers arent allowed to destroy employee records, so the e-mail itself will be there in the future, if you need it down the road. Of course, your attorney will have to get past the whole issue of confidential company records not being released to anyone, but if your case is serious enough, pursue it. In the meantime, even quiet people can betray you, so watch your back with bcc. 2006 Shirley Ann Parker |
