E-mail monitoring is a touchy subject among employees and employers alike. Many employees feel that e-mail is a personal matter and that their employers have no right to take measures to monitor e-mail. On the other side of the fence, however, a great many employers believe that it is fully within their right to use e-mail monitoring measures. The thought is: if you’re on the clock, you’re on our time and anything you say or do can be used against you when you’re called on the carpet.

I made the mistake of saying the wrong thing on a company e-mail system once. I vowed to never make the same mistake. Of course, that was in the days before the Internet… and long before I left the corporate nest… I had no clue that my e-mail was monitored [...]