There are many reasons for why employers will want to monitor their employee’s emails. One thing you will have to ask yourself when you do this is whether it is legal or not. In most countries email monitoring is legal to a certain point and you need to be aware of these points. You also need to have a reason for why you are monitoring the email like data protection.

Monitoring employee email

Monitoring employee email is something that must be undertaken after a few considerations. These considerations will have to take into account the laws in the country and what they allow you to do. Many countries allow the employer to legally access employee email that is in storage but not any email that is in transit. As employers are held accountable for what their staff do this is review of old email is acceptable especially if there has been a complaint about them.

Company email is something that most employees will expect to be monitored by the employer but it should be noted that in some countries it is possible for other email accounts to be checked by the employer. This is legally allowed if the terminal used to send the email is owned by the employer. Of course there have been cases where when taken to court the ruling has been in favour of the employee rather than the employer so this kind of employee email monitoring should be undertaken with caution.
Something else that can play a role in the legality of email monitoring is the employee’s contract. If the contract states that any email will be subject to monitoring then the employee has consented to it.

However if there is no mention of this in the contract then some precautionary measures need to be taken before any monitoring is done.

Data protection

The reasons behind employee email monitoring will vary from company to company. However one reason that is quite common is data protection. The need to protect data is one of the driving factors for this type of monitoring. Email is an easy way for employees to leak data from one company to another and this can serious compromise a company.

Data protection does not only include leaks of data by staff through email but also viruses and other electronic threats that can be transmitted via email. The best way to prevent any malicious attacks through employee email monitoring is to have a clear office policy for email monitoring. In this policy it should be stated that any emails containing links, attachments and downloads should be sent to the IT department of the company. In the office policy it is important that you also state that any email opened from a personal account that has links and downloads are prohibited as they can be a security threat.

Employee email monitoring is something that is legal if done within certain parameters. The best thing to do would be to have a clear and concise office policy that outlines everything that will be monitored. It is also good to have some steps in the policy that will enable data protection as well.

Author Bio: This article was submitted by Simona Rusnakova, Internet Marketing consultant of 3r.ie, on behalf of Pixalert – Protect Critical Data. PixAlert is the market leader in products and services that provide detection of critical data for corporations.

Category: Computers and Technology
Keywords: monitoring employee email, employee email monitoring, protect data, data protection