Be Aware of Your Employer’s Email Policy

Remember that towering stack of papers you pretended to read and then signed? No, not the ones you signed without reading when you bought your house—the stack of papers you signed without reading when you started your job. Somewhere in there was information about your health insurance (or lack of it), something affirming your citizenship status and probably an acknowledgment of how as an at-will employee you could be fired at any time for any reason—or for no reason at all. If you signed all of that paperwork in the last five or ten years chances are that one of the pieces of paper you ignored was your company’s email policy. Now might be a good time to go back and read that. Even if you have no idea what you did with all of those orientation papers you can probably find the policy on your company’s intranet site. If worse comes to worse, ask your HR person for a copy—though they might wonder what you’re up to.

Odds are your policy says something close to what mine says. No one likes to write these kinds of things from scratch and companies tend to borrow liberally from each other. It's likely that your firm’s policy says something along the lines that all your email is the property of your firm and that while some personal use is permitted it is expected that it will be kept to a minimum. It probably also says that everything in your email is subject to review by the company. There’s no room here to claim that your email is private; unlike in the UK, where personal privacy rules are much more stringent, there are no laws in the US protecting the privacy of email (or voicemail, for that matter) in the workplace.

If you really must have private email conversations at work or need to provide an email address for personal transactions like banking or shopping it’s an excellent idea to set up an email account through one of the free services like Hotmail or Gmail. Although some companies block these sites to prevent viruses from sneaking into their systems, many will allow you to use them. That way you have a place to keep your personal messages that you can access when you need to but is out of the hands of your employer. In all likelihood, your firm doesn’t want your personal mail anyway. Since it can ultimately be held responsible for any mail on its system, your company can—at least theoretically—be sued if you use your email to stalk a co-worker or bilk Nigerians out of their life savings.

Realistically, you’re going to use your work email to make dinner plans and receive confirmations from your travel agent. But use a personal email account for anything that’s less than innocuous.