How safe is your corporate mail account?

Most people I have come across prefer to part with their corporate mail IDs when requested. I often used to find this rather annoying when they change jobs without any intimation and with it their Ids. Consequently you lose a good friend or a customer (if you are a businessman). I have often also wondered why they don’t have a Yahoo or MSN id. Which is safer if definitely a debatable subject.

However now, there is news for all you corporate ID users. Study has revealed that in most of the big companies in the United States and in the Europe, companies actually hire employees to read and analyze outbound mail. The justifications may be plenty ranging from wanting to safe guard from legal, financial or regulatory risk to wanting to check industrial espionage. How many of the employees know that their outgoing mail has been read? Actually, hardly any.
In the results of the survey that was conducted in the United States and Europe spanning over 406 companies employing more than a thousand employees, almost 38 percent admitted to employing people to read and sift through out going mails. In the US, amongst companies employing more than 20,000 employees, this number went up to 44 percent. According to Gary Steele, chief executive of Cupertino, California-based Proofpoint Inc. which conducted the study along with Forrester Research, "There are organizations where employees think they can say whatever they want to say and nobody is going to read it."

These results will surely ruffle some feathers because a lot of people would be affected. After all, no one wants to have his or her secrets being snooped into. In this case especially depending on who is sifting through your mail, it can evoke reactions from nothing making it look all normal to probably some weird person impersonating you later on, or modifying the contents of your mail somehow to blackmailing you.

Another point worth considering is that this method will only check the mails being sent through the company server. What stops me from sending a mail through my laptop sitting in the confines of my office if I had a mobile phone to connect me to another ISP?