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IT seems the employer needs to tell you if they spy/monitor your emails and this should extend if they spy on your screen or activity. If the worker is informed all should be fine then,it seems a very logical solution. Edit I used the wrong email address in the past by mistake, it can happen if you have a few email addresses setup in Thunderbird and similar, after I done the mistake I made sure to double check the email address I used(I worked remote from my own PC).

This is not about the right of an employer to check email, this is about the right of an employee to know about it.

The other aspect I see here is that the ability to get into a former employee's email account may be important for business continuity. Employee dies or leaves suddenly? They may have access to online accounts or information in their email that didn't quite make it onto the corporate wiki or that no one else had access to (although a good company would minimize that). Important to be able to get in there and just get stuff done.

On the other hand - just the other day I was looking at "Blind" (because it got advertized on my Instagram feed) that claims to be a "private"-ish social network for employees of a company to share information. Many of the reviews claim there are ulterior motives, etc. but the chief complaint seems to be that it requires verification through work email, and obviously that's begging for your employer to find out about your involvement in these back channels. Online employer verification that doesn't give yourself away, and isn't as easy to spoof as LinkedIn? That seems like a hard problem to solve...

Not being able to read dead employee's emails seems like a really tiny inconvenience (especially since there are so many ways an employee can effectively delete mails that you're doing something catastrophically wrong if your business continuity is dependant upon a mail account access) in comparison of constant monitoring of peoples private communication.

And "we may need to occasionally access your account on company-run email servers" is also a really different thing in contrast with "constant monitoring of peoples private communication". I doubt any company really gets a positive ROI on constantly monitoring people's chats, so it's their loss. I think other commenters have made a sufficiently good case for your work email not being considered private communication anyway.

I mean, you're also doing something catastrophically wrong personally if your privacy is dependent on a company wanting to read company-related data on their own infrastructure but thinking, "Oh, no... a European court might frown on this..."

> given that anything said by it could be construed as a statement by the company itself.

I don't think this reasoning holds up in this case, given that it was a Yahoo! messenger account with private messages to the employee's brother and fiancee that were in question.

That aside, there are different standards in Europe, IIRC, for things like using work email and network resources for personal use. Most employers I'm aware of don't mind occasional personal use, even while at work, within reasonable parameters (e.g. browsing porn at work probably would not fly at most places, possibly even if it's only on the work network after hours). Many of us posting here now are probably posting from work. Another commenter mentioned that his wife occasionally sends him mail at his work email because she thinks it would be faster or something. All of these would probably be broadly acceptable outside of places like finance or defense contracting that heavily monitor and regulate their networks. I don't think such things are generally considered acceptable in Europe. (I am happy to be proven wrong, if anyone has firsthand knowledge, however.)

I expect my work email to be monitored, because that's how US corporations work. I would never use my work email address to sign up for anything personal and important. I've got a device in my pocket that's linked to my personal email if I want to access something like that at work, anyway.

In spite of my expectation that I'll be monitored using work accounts and on the work network, I still believe people should be told so explicitly. Not only should they be told that monitoring will occur, but they should be fully notified of what is and is not acceptable. This just seems basic to me.

Oh, and BTW, and FYI, it's per se.

They do have the right to monitor, they just have to tell the employees that they are monitoring.

The distinction is understood, but should it be necessary for employers to explicitly express that the use of company resources may be monitored?

Then again, I get the impression that I was brought up in a very different way from most people since I regularly have to explain seemingly minor details to coworkers. To explain how these seemingly petty policies are there to avoid problems that may rarely pop-up on small scales, yet are tangible costs/risks when a business has hundreds or thousands of employees.

"The distinction is understood, but should it be necessary for employers to explicitly express that the use of company resources may be monitored?"

Yes. I honestly don't see any downside to this. Informing people of things allows them to make better decisions on, say, where to work.

> but should it be necessary for employers to explicitly express that the use of company resources may be monitored?

Yes. Legally, in Europe, the expectation is that communication is private, and if you want to listen in, you need to get permission. Owning and operating telecommunication equipment does not give you the right to listen to its users.

In one of my previous jobs I was specificly encouraged (during introductory employee training) to use my work email for personal stuff, as all access to private email boxes was cut off by proxy servers. I wonder how many people fell for that.

If they are blocking access to private email, it probably because of a regulatory requirement (common in finance) that they absolute must monitor and record everything going in and out. If that the case, and they didn't make that clear, then that's of course bad.

Cutting off access to other email services in some cases can be a good choice.