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How big is your company and what type of industry are you in? I know that many large corporations have the ability to monitor email and/computer activity, but this is mostly random vs. constant & usually in business sectors that deal with very sensitive data. Unless you work in a highly data sensitive business, I think most of your employees would raise issues about privacy if you install computer monitoring software to watch their email activity. Can you tell us more about what you want to monitor? Their time spent on personal email? Or what information they may transmit to others? That information may help us brainstorm a solution.

One of the best ways to monitor your employee email activity is Email Archiving. StreetSmart7 is a hosted email and collaboration suite which offers email archiving. It archives all incoming and outgoing email. You can also set retention policies to dump the archived email after so many days, weeks, or months. It also allows you to remove the archived mail manually. You can read more about it at http://www.infostreet.com/Applications/Email_Archiving/index.htm

By the way, I work for Infostreet as a Marketing Manager and just joined this forum and I find it really helpful. If there is anything I can do or possibly give you a tour of the system, please call me directly.

Thanks,
Sam
(818) 776-8080 ext.241

I just watched a follow up to the story of the news anchor who was monitoring his fellow employees emails. He is on trial now. Anyway, the local news station did a story about monitoring emails at work, and according to them, employers can monitor emails. It is legal in most states. The really interesting thing is that the professional pretty much repeated much of the advice here. Be careful, it can hurt morale, protect sensitive company information, and be upfront and let employees know you are doing it.

I had to smile because we had already covered most of what they were talking about.

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.

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

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