Home: Message List - How to monitor employees EMAIL activity

Re: How to monitor employees EMAIL activity

Iwrite — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 21:21:43 GMT

Ivarchie,

Great point. I was trying to get that across in an earlier post - sure you can do it but what is it going to cost you in the long run in morale and trust of your employees? How does it effect the atmosphere of your business or company?

What about cell phones and PDAs? Do you listen in on phone calls made on the company phone? Why stop with the emails and web access?

You are right, people should be looking at the productivity of their workers.

Re: How to monitor employees EMAIL activity

xenopod — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 20:35:15 GMT

Basic information like to, from, and subject would be in the server logs. Is this an exchange server or some other email solution? If you want to block access to certain websites you'll need to configure your firewall to do that. If you don't firewall web based email systems like yahoo and hotmail then they will have access to those systems and you'll have no idea what kind of email they are sending since they are sending it through that service instead of through outlook.

Re: How to monitor employees EMAIL activity

lvarchie — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 21:26:39 GMT

I would ask whether monitoring your employee's email is really the issue. In my experience when employees know what there job is and have enough work to do they don't have time to surf or do non-work related emails (sure, you will always have a few). For those employees that don't get their work done on time or properly then that is a performance management issue that you need to take the appropriate steps to resolve.

I would urge you to make sure you are attacking the right problem. Monitoring email only creates a sense of distrust from your employees and probably doesn't buy you anything.

Re: How to monitor employees EMAIL activity

mediadave — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 18:32:32 GMT

Yes. Exactly.
Without consulting a lawyer my understanding is, as an employee of a company, you are a representative of that company.
The company itself holds the rights to any of the 'going ons' by it's employee's, etc...
I don't think there would be any legal issues in monitoring their emails just as you would review any work, projects, etc...
I know of plenty of companies which have put controls on the internet to keep their employee's on task, so the same should go for email.
Best of Luck.

Re: How to monitor employees EMAIL activity

AndyHoung — Sat, 29 Nov 2008 04:07:17 GMT

Hi,
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Re: How to monitor employees EMAIL activity

intechspecial — Sun, 23 Nov 2008 07:17:50 GMT

Monitoring your employees email activity should be the standard and not the exception.

Re: How to monitor employees EMAIL activity

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Re: How to monitor employees EMAIL activity

intechspecial — Sun, 02 Nov 2008 06:11:20 GMT

Look at this way:

They are using your computer at your company to do business for you.

The emails they send day to day, are for the benefit of your company.

Any IT network administrator understands there are certain permission set in place for individuals, groups as well as managers and CEO.

Any network administrator that knows his head from the a hole in the ground also understands that you purposely set up a network to monitor EVERYTHING that happens, so that if an employee recieves a virus, emails proprietary information, or hacks into the server, the server logs, security logs, records, documentation, etc is kept, so that it is reported as it should be.

It is not uncommon for the IT department of any company to allow the CEO or certain managers the ability to remote in to someones desktop in the background to check on someones activity.

We are not talking about listening in on someone personal home phone conversation, we are talking about YOUR COMPANY, YOUR BUSINESS.

If there are "privacy laws" to protect employees email while working on company time from within your company offices, while using a companies computer(honestly I have never heard of such a thing) then you need to clearly state that you will be monitoring what they do at point of hire. I really doubt that such a law exists, because then you would have an employee downloading pornography and sending and recieving naked pictures of himself/herself in emails from a domain that has YOUR BUSINESS NAME on it, because the law states you the business owner can not look into what he does on YOUR companys computer while working in *YOUR companys office*????? You are not tapping his personal phone line, you are looking at YOUR OWN COMPUTER??????? Does this not make sense?

You would not give a sales person the keys to a company car, company credit card, and customer information, and then tell him 'you know what I am going to protect your privacy, and not be concerned about what you do when I am not around".

Now I do understand that some employees might have personal email accounts with yahoo and such, but these should not be something that is used on a regular basis on company time. By law, I am not allowed to log into the personal email account of my employees, but I am allowed to check into everything he does while on my computer. If they are on your computer, you have every right in the world to install a keystroke logger to make sure he/she isn't selling your secrets or your customers to someone else. Whos computer is this? Whos office is he/she working out of? If he brings in his own personal computer this is a different story, but no company should allow an employee to attach his personal computer on there network, unless you would like all your customer information posted on the web.

If I might suggest, if you can afford to, get a good IT firm to do check into your configuartion and make sure you are doing things as they should be done before you run into more trouble then what it is worth. Pay the $150 an hour if you would like to your attorney, but this is YOUR COMPANY.

Michael A. Stratton; MCSA, MCP, A+, Net+, Server+, MCNPS

Re: How to monitor employees EMAIL activity

intechspecial — Sun, 02 Nov 2008 05:45:01 GMT

I disagree with iwrite on this.

If your employees are working under your company name, you have every write in the world to monitor there activity.

This is proprietary information and it is the responsbility of your IT department to set policies and rules in place that will insure they are doing what they are supposed to be doing.

Employees should not be spending a good amount of time, if any to send personal or email that are private, and for any company to just allow there employees to do what they want as they want is a company doomed to failure.

Any attorney or IT professional will back me up on this, that this is your company and you have the write to look into anything your employees are doing on your time, and employees that need to keep secrets on company time are employees that you need to concern yourself with.

Re: How to monitor employees EMAIL activity

RichardGengle — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 13:23:35 GMT

I agree - the best way is to use e-mail archiving software.

From my personal experience I can recommend a tool called archive manager http://www.scriptlogic.com/products/archive-manager

We implemented this tool some time ago - it does a nice job.
This solution captures all e-mail activity to sql database allowing powerful search by content, attachment or any other parameter.
I can easily track email messages by any particular employee or customer.