Inbox privacy at work.

December 20, 2006 6:53 PM

Inbox privacy at work.

I'll be going out of town for a week and my co-workers will be watching my email Inbox at work while I'm away.

While I'm not concerned about anything I've sent... I can't help but worry about what some of my friends might email me while I'm away.

How do I keep them from reading personal emails, yet give them access to work emails while I'm away.

We use Microsoft Outlook.

posted by anonymous to work & money (19 comments total)

Setup an email rule to move any friends emails to a private folder that you coworkers don't need to look at.
Or set the rule forward to a personal email address then delete it from your work one. You would need a comprehensive list of your friends emails for this to work though.
posted by metaname at 7:00 PM on December 20, 2006

Why on earth is this anonymous? It's a fairly benign question.

I would suggest two things. First, in the future, use a separate e-mail account for your friends than you do for work. If you have net access, just sign up for a gmail account or something similar.

Second, just send a brief e-mail to all of your friends telling them not to e-mail you for the next [insert period of time that you're away for]. This probably won't take you more than five minutes.

Anything more than that is looking for a difficult solution to a simple problem.
posted by The God Complex at 7:01 PM on December 20, 2006

If you're using Outlook with an Exchange server, you should be able to delegate access to certain folders but not others, so set up rules to put personal messages into a folder that you haven't given permission for others to see.

If you're not using an Exchange server, I think your best bet is to email your friends and ask them not to send anything incriminating while you're away.
posted by sanko at 7:01 PM on December 20, 2006

Important note: While your direct co-workers may not be reading your e-mails on a daily basis, someone in your company probably is. Not every company monitors e-mail, but most do and it's always better to assume that yours does.
posted by Partial Law at 7:09 PM on December 20, 2006

I can't figure out why anyone would mix their personal e-mail with their work e-mail. I never share my work e-mail with my friends. Perhaps you should set up a new account, just for personal e-mail. Feel free to e-mail me if you need a Gmail invite.
posted by ThePinkSuperhero at 7:10 PM on December 20, 2006 [1 favorite has favorites]

Yeah, I'll echo ThePinkSuperhero, separate your two lives because you really shouldn't be mixing the two.

Aside your company's right to read your email (since its really their email), yes, even your private email, what happens when you quit or get fired?

Get a GMail account, its easy to check and you can take it with you and you wouldn't be running into this problem.
posted by fenriq at 7:19 PM on December 20, 2006

Inbox privacy at work.

Sharp dullness. Bright darkness. Cold fusion. Oxy moron.

Separate your personal and work email, always.
posted by ikkyu2 at 8:31 PM on December 20, 2006

Setup an email rule to move any friends emails to a private folder that you coworkers don't need to look at...You would need a comprehensive list of your friends emails for this to work though.

why would you need a comprehensive list of friends' emails?

why not just set up a filter that leaves all mail from the @company.com domain in the inbox, and redirects anything else to a private/personal folder or forwards it to a private email account?
posted by Ziggy Zaga at 9:22 PM on December 20, 2006

why not just set up a filter that leaves all mail from the @company.com domain in the inbox, and redirects anything else to a private/personal folder or forwards it to a private email account?

Because they're receiving work-related email from outside the company.
posted by sanko at 9:35 PM on December 20, 2006

What everyone else has said.

Absolutely set up a non-work email account for non-work email. If you're worried about someone reading your incoming mail, as Partial Law said, there's a very real chance they already are. And from the sounds of it, good reasons for you company to be doing it.

Set up a gmail account, send a CC to all your friends that you are changing email addresses to your gmail account. Then set up a filter on your work account that will delete any email coming from your friends.

If that last bit is too harsh, set it to forward to your gmail account then delete. But getting personal, especially questionable email at a work email address is a no-no. And with the availability of free and kick-ass email accounts, there's no reason to do it.
posted by Ookseer at 3:30 AM on December 21, 2006

I should point out here that many companies (my girlfriend's certainly does) block all net-based email sites at the firewall level. So setting up a non-work email address, if you want to stay in touch with your friends during work hours, could theoretically be impossible.
posted by antifuse at 3:36 AM on December 21, 2006

I had a temp job once at a large company (oil company, in fact) where I was hired to replace a young male employee on long term medical leave. I was given access to his Outlook in order to continue correspondence with customers that he had already initiated. I was told to go through the mail in it in order to familiarize myself with the relevant threads in progress, the kind of problems that need to be resolved and different customers I would be interacting with. They informed me that they would be monitoring the traffic for at least a little bit to make sure I didn't mess anything major up.

I was utterly dumbfounded by the shit this guy had in his inbox (four years worth, at that). There were diatribes about how much he disliked his department, heated exchanges with ex-girlfriends, letters to college friends about going on prolonged drunken benders, frank and detailed disclosures of his mental illness and how it affected his job performance (this was the reason for his leave, I was later told). It went on and on.

The best was his exchange with his superior regarding his last review grade of a D-. He received no payraise. He was arguing that this was unfair and should be reconsidered. His boss told him stone cold that the grade and his raise accurately reflected his effort level and the amount of progress he had made, and told him better luck next year.

The guy knew he was being monitored, he just ignored the fact. His supervisor would jump in the middle of email conversations to correct problems or to speed resolutions when necessary, so it was totally clear that this was the case. And absolute best part is that webmail wasn't even blocked, I was able to use my Yahoo! account the whole time I was there.

I guess the moral of the story is that if you're concerned about inappropriate mail coming in while you're gone, you've probably already received inappropriate mail that someone above you has read. A more permanent solution is very in order.
posted by The Straightener at 4:45 AM on December 21, 2006

Set up a new personal email address and then announce your new address to your friends using your new email account. Politely tell your friends to no longer use your old (work) email address. If you can set up a filter at work to capture the email of people most likely to not pay attention to your request, do it. Something simple that redirects the email to a separate folder, and perhaps replies with a polite reminder of your new personal email address.
posted by terrapin at 6:23 AM on December 21, 2006

Why on earth is this anonymous? It's a fairly benign question

Perhaps his/her co-worker is a MeFite as well?
posted by allkindsoftime at 8:12 AM on December 21, 2006

metaname writes "Setup an email rule to move any friends emails to a private folder that you coworkers don't need to look at."

Make sure the private folder is in your mailbox and not a .PST so they can be processed by the server. .PST action rules don't process unless you are logged in and the loggee has access to the .PST.

I can't figure out why anyone would mix their personal e-mail with their work e-mail. I never share my work e-mail with my friends."

I can think of three reasons:

1. general tech cluelessness
2. firewalls blocking web mail (Though I would set my gmail to forward to my work address the user may not know how. See 1)
3. hang over from the old days. 20 years ago (heck 10 years ago) options for non work email were limited or non existant. Even today it might not occur to someone without home net access that they should have a personal mail address seperate from their work.

posted by Mitheral at 8:25 AM on December 21, 2006

In addition to what everyone else said above, about separating personal from work email, I still can’t imagine giving a co-worker access to my Inbox. Is this a company policy or something?

When I’m away for an extended period, I use Outlook’s “Out-of-Office Assistant” to generate an automatic reply to incoming messages. My usual format is “I will be out of the office from X date to Y date. I will reply to your message when I return. If you have an urgent request, please e-mail Jane Doe at [e-mail]. For invoice inquiries, please email John Doe at [e-mail].” That way people can get help if it’s urgent, but my coworkers don’t have to deal with the run of the mill crap. Can you do that, instead?
posted by CiaoMela at 8:47 AM on December 21, 2006

(For that matter, you could set up an out-of-office message saying "I will be out of the office from X to Y. In the meantime, messages sent to this address will be read by So And So." That gives your professional contacts a better idea what's going on, and it gives your friends a reminder to hold off on sending personal messages there if they forget.)
posted by nebulawindphone at 9:56 AM on December 21, 2006

CiaoMela writes "I still can’t imagine giving a co-worker access to my Inbox. Is this a company policy or something? "

This is fairly common is large organisations that deal with the public. You don't want potential clients going somewhere else because the only email address they had was OOO.
posted by Mitheral at 10:10 AM on December 21, 2006

there is no privacy at work unless you are using your own hardware, software and network or do some tricky tunneling, etc.

assume anything you access or send at work can and could be viewed by any or all your mgt chain, it dept, etc. at this point i would just start thinking about damage control and encouraging your friends to use a different address, that you check when not at work.

that said, best recommendation for now is create a rule that runs on your desktop to move any mails from friends you are concerned about to an offline folder. however this rule will only run on your desktop, while your acct is logged in, and outlook is running, as its a client side rule. this will prevent your covering coworker from seeing the mails, however they're aleady in your company's server, so if they want, they're reading them.
posted by xxiii at 1:23 AM on December 23, 2006