Emails, which are sent or received by employees through company-provided email accounts, are not usually considered private. Employers have the right to monitor these emails in the interest of the company. Email monitoring also helps a company to prevent data leaks, theft of trade secrets, or any other malicious activity. In this post, we have discussed email monitoring in detail, its legality, and things to keep in mind while formulating an email monitoring policy.
Email monitoring is important to protect your company from any untoward event that may occur due to malicious activity of your employee or external attacks, such as phishing, spam, etc. Below given are some possible reasons that may require you to implement employee email monitoring measures in place:
Generally, employers have the right to monitor work emails sent or received by their employees. United States law dictates that any email an employee sends or receives on a company system is the property of the employer and can be reviewed by the company at any time. Similar laws can be found in other countries, which authorize the employer to monitor employees’ emails. Still, it’s a good idea to mention email monitoring in the company policy document. Intimating employees about the policy beforehand will deter them from using company email accounts for purposes other than what they are intended for.
Though, as an employer, you have a legal right to read your employees’ emails, it is still suggested to draft an effective email policy. Following are some guidelines that you can follow while formulating the policy:
Follow the given guidelines to effectively monitor emails:
Even if you put an email monitoring process in place, you may encounter a data breach, phishing attack, or data exposure due to unwarranted email send-outs. In such a case, you need to thoroughly investigate all the employees’ emails to find out the culprit. For this, you can take the help of a specialized email investigation tool, such as Stellar Email Forensic. This advanced email analysis software offers support for multiple email platforms and message views. You can easily search for a particular email message by using the Boolean Search and Regular Expression Search functions available in the software. You can also use the tool to recover deleted emails, manage investigation cases with features like bookmarks, tags, and logs. In addition, you can create detailed case reports that can be submitted as evidence in court if needed.
Abhinav Sethi is a Senior Writer at Stellar. He writes articles, blog posts, knowledge-bases, case studies, etc. for different technologies. He also has a keen interest in digital forensics and helps forward-thinking companies fight different threats with apt solutions.
