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Comment by izzydata | Hacker News Reader

Everything about this is fine and dandy, but I don't understand why anyone would use their work email for personal use. An email address isn't a difficult to obtain resource. Anyone can make a hundred email addresses and use all of them for different things.

I guess the guy just never thought of it as an issue even if he was being monitored until it became an issue. I don't know.

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I'd go further, I think I might disagree with the ruling. When you write under my.name@company.com, you are representing the company to some degree. Things you write are things the company could be called to answer for, if not in the court of law then certainly in that of public opinion. I think the company has an implicit right to know what gets written under those email addresses.

(This is different from, say, browsing the Internet from a work computer, in which case I don't think the company has any non-security reasons to monitor which pages you visit.)

One exception is can see is answering private emails - if my wife or a friend writes to my work address, I can't see any problem with replying from that same address, and it would feel a little silly to require employees to copy-paste the email to a different account.

I don't know if that was the reason this Romanian employee was fired. And now that I think about it, firing an employee over this offence seems comically draconian to me, which makes me wonder if:

a) the employer wanted to fire the guy for unrelated but hard-to-prove reasons, and the personal emails were a convenient and easily documented excuse

and/or

b) the Court aren't actually worried about the right to personal privacy in your work email account, but they are very worried about potentially handing employers a convenient way to fire an employee at any time for the IT equivalent of jaywalking, even years after the fact

If it's (b) I would consider the Court's decision very wise.

edit: just read the PDF linked below. This part stood out to me:

> On 13 July 2007 Mr Bărbulescu was summoned by his employer to give an explanation. He was informed that his Yahoo Messenger communications had been monitored and that there was evidence that he had used the internet for personal purposes. Mr Bărbulescu replied in writing that he had only used the service for professional purposes. He was then presented with a transcript of 45 pages of his communications from 5 to 12 July 2007 [..] On 1 August 2007 the employer terminated Mr Bărbulescu’s employment contract for breach of the company’s internal regulations that prohibited the use of company resources for personal purposes.

All potential of abuse aside - If I were an employer, and an employee brazenly lied to my face like that, I would consider it a strong reason for firing him even if the matter at hand were wholly trivial.

> One exception is can see is answering private emails - if my wife or a friend writes to my work address, I can't see any problem with replying from that same address, and it would feel a little silly to require employees to copy-paste the email to a different account.

From the excerpts of the verdict I've read, this is pretty much what they're saying. That is, employers should exercise some discretion when they start reading employee's emails and shouldn't do so on a whim. Seems pretty reasonable to me.

if i send a private letter with a return address of my office, i am not representing the company, even though the company name appears on the envelope. An email domain is no different than a street address.

I'm not sure. The return address is printed on the back of an envelope, whereas the sender's email address is prominently displayed at the top of everything you send.

It's a subtle difference, but IMO a relevant one. I think it's closer to writing a letter on the company's stationery, letterhead and all. Particulary since, in my experience, company email accounts normally add a signature with company's contact information and the sender's position in it.

I'm finding them harder and harder to obtain privately. I wanted a free throw away email address recently, so I tried a few of the big names - yahoo, hotmail, outlook, gmail. I couldn't see a way to sign up for any one of these without giving out an existing email address to them. If I wanted something unconnected to anything else, I had no way to do that. I'm not sure how someone getting on the internet for the first time would do it with any free service. I'm not opposed to paying for an email account, but it does create a barrier to entry.

Gmail asks you for your current email address, but it isn't actually required. I just tried it and made a new account in two clicks.

I assume the same applies to at least some of the others.

If its throwaway, perhaps something like mailinator would do the trick?

Try outside the big ones? It takes only a few minutes to find one host that allows one to register without such stupidity.

The number one reason I've seen is for things that need visibility during the work day. For example, if my girlfriend needs to email me something I need to take action on during the work day, she knows to email my work email. Same with people who are doing time sensitive things for me (e.g. my realtor during a recent home purchase). Sure, I could start monitoring my personal email just as closely as my work email, but it's preferable for me (and probably preferable for my company) that I use my work email for work & time sensitive personal items, and use my personal email only outside of work for non-time sensitive personal matters.

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