Melbourne Age : mail.chauvinists

Those who have been using the company e-mail to keep in touch with their mum, conduct a torrid affair, or bitch about colleagues had better stop sharpish. An e-mail is about as private as a postcard. Jenny Sinclair reports.

It's this easy: the network administrator logs on as "postmaster", clicks on a few links, types in a system password and there they are: your "secret" e-mails.

The first click brings up the e-mail system, the second a list of options - including personal mailboxes - the third click brings up every address in the building, and the fourth displays all your messages.

At this point, your personal e-mails and any office backstabbing is one click of the mouse from the cold light of day. The man with the system password can read your messages, copy them, send them on to the HR department or delete them, and you'd never know.

Not until he's hauled before the boss and sacked, which was the fate of several Melbourne workers last year.

Unfortunately, according to industrial lawyer at Slater and Gordon, Craig Dowling, they didn't get their jobs back because their bosses had every (legal) right to be snooping.

In one case, a man was sacked for conducting an affair on the internal e-mail system - but he was fired for the huge amount of work time he'd wasted, not for the romance.

In another, a woman was keeping some e-mails on her computer that her supervisor found, and found offensive; she too lost her job.

Dowling has seen "an increasing prevalence of cases where ... an e-mail has subsequently come to the attention of an employer and the consequences have been termination or disciplinary action."

"The way the law stands, there's no strict right to privacy for an employee of e-mail material," Dowling says.

In 1996, a worker in the United States called Michael Smyth took his employer, the Pillsbury Company, to court for intercepting his e-mail from home to his supervisor. He had disparaged the company's salespeople with comments like "kill the backstabbing bastards" and referred to the office party as "the Jim Jones Koolaid affair".

Even though the company had previously promised that his e-mail would be private, Smyth was fired.

You might think of your e-mail as normal mail, only on computer, sealed safely inside its electronic envelope. But US security expert Bruce Schneier, author of Email Security, says they're more like postcards, and anyone who wants to can read them.

Schneier says that can include your boss, the government, opposition companies, the tax office, curious colleagues and fraudsters.

As more workers come online, the temptation to use e-mail to chat with friends or chat up a lover increases. But the only way for your boss to know for sure what you're up to is to monitor your inbox.

That part is easy: network administrators can intercept mail; stored e-mail is extremely easy to access at your PC, mail can be copied to a supervisor, and some people don't even bother to use passwords, so any old person can log on as you.

Employers say while they don't approve of use of e-mail to play Romeo, play the stockmarket or chase another job, they don't actively snoop.

Channel Nine's Melbourne publicity manager, Kelly Davis, says management there "certainly don't" check e-mail, but if the volume of personal correspondence got too high, it would be discouraged, in exactly the same way as excessive private phone calls or faxes.

Andre Bacard, the US-based author of The Computer Privacy Handbook, is sceptical. "Of course most snoops will deny they're reading your e-mail because they want to continue doing so." He believes that at least a quarter of organisations read workers' e-mail sometimes.

In Australia, industry policies and codes on e-mail have yet to be tested in court. Schneier says cases rarely make it that far because they're "embarrassing" for everyone involved.

In the United States, with its stronger belief in free speech and a litigious population, more cases have been tried. But even there, privacy is not paramount. Michael Smith, of the "backstabbing bastards", did not get his job back. The Pennsylvania court said he had no right to expect his e-mail to stay private.

Once your mail leaves the building, it's possibly less safe. The chairman of online liberties group Electronic Frontiers Australia, Kimberley Heitman, says service providers could read just about any e-mail that goes through their servers, but don't, under industry codes.

"Businesses assume that their machines are their exclusive property and they may administer user privacy as they see fit," Heitman says. "Some firms are operating e-mail filters and web proxies to restrict employee usage, other businesses read e-mail at will and search proxy logs."

Service providers may be accountable to the law for what their users do, and they often reserve the right to check e-mail and Internet use if necessary.

OzEmail, with more than 300,000 accounts, tells users: "If we have cause, we may monitor the conduct of your account to determine whether this (acceptable use) policy is being followed."

The technology has got way ahead of the law - phone networks are heavily protected from tapping under law, but anything on an office network is technically the property of the company, and workers' rights are limited.

Even if your boss resists the temptation to scan your e-mail, it could still end up being read by the very people you don't want to see it. E-mail is covered by the normal rules of evidence in court cases and can be subpoenaed, and government e-mail may be subject to freedom of information rules. The best policy is to assume your e-mails will be read. Lawyer Craig Dowling has some advice for anyone even considering putting anything private into an e-mail: "Be very careful."