Who's reading your email?

According to this article in the Wall Street Journal, it's getting a bit tougher--before the courts anyway--to monitor an employee's email. What I found fascinating is that 38% of companies have someone on staff whose job it is to read outgoing emails.

And that means your personal accounts, too. At least if you access them from the office:

In another case this year, Bonnie Van Alstyne, a former vice president of sales and marketing at Electronic Scriptorium Ltd., a data-management company, was in the thick of a testy legal battle in Virginia state court with the company over employment issues when it came to light that her former boss had been accessing and reading her personal AOL email account. The monitoring went on for more than a year, continuing after Ms. Van Alstyne left the company. Ms. Van Alstyne sometimes used her personal email account for business purposes, and her supervisor said he was concerned that she was sharing trade secrets.

The supervisor, Edward Leonard, had accessed her account "from home and Internet cafes, and from locales as diverse as London, Paris, and Hong Kong," according to legal filings in the case.

Ms. Van Alstyne sued Mr. Leonard and the company for accessing her email without authorization. A jury sided with her, and the case eventually settled.

Um, she left the company. Continuing to access her personal account after she is gone sounds like stalking to me. I wonder if Mr. Leonard is still with the company?

A plea for subject lines

This post on BNET about how to annoy your colleagues with email put me in mind of some email problems that I have experienced lately. Well, not my problem really: other people's problems.

• Sending email with no subject header or a re: subject header. It screams: I'm a virus, I'm a virus. I have set my email to kick these suckers out of the queue, straight to delete. If you send your job applications like that you have just sent them to the electrical shredder. Ditto, if you did this to follow up on a request from someone you met at a networking event, or to ask your former bosses to give you a reference. It doesn't matter if they recognize the email address. Prudence says, turf it. If you think your bosses will remember your name and email from when you worked there, that was your corporate email. They aren't going to know gobbledygook at google.com
  
• Vague subject lines are just as bad, since those have been hijacked by spammers. About our conversation last week is terrible, and I might delete it since I think that one has been used by people trying to sell me Viagra. About our conversation at CLA is a bit better, until bots start using acronyms and abbreviations, hoping for a bite. Use a specific subject line, such as a short paraphrase of the topic discussed, and then use We discussed this at CLA, in the body of the message so I remember who you are. 
• If you are applying on a job posting with a reference number and job title, use both. Some jobs titles have multiple competitions with different numbers, so use both to help with filtering.
  

What if I sent the email message out with no subject line by mistake and it is due right away: do I resend? Oh, no, multiple copies of items with attachments from the same address doesn't look like spam at all. If they're going to open it, sending it once to the appropriate person (assuming you got that right) will take care of the problem.

Fill out subject lines first, job title and number, and then cut, paste and attach your messages and documents into the email. Don't leave a subject line blank, but if you got everything else right, don't punish yourself for that small mistake, but make it easier on the HR person to sort you out.

Leaving the door unlocked

Do you check your personal or school email at work? I bet that you do. Many workplaces will certainly allow you to do so, especially if you are on your break, but if you are checking your email at work, do you remember to close it afterward?

There are several terminals in my workplace that are shared terminals, meaning that they are not open to the public, but that many workers use the same terminal. And some of these workers leave their email open, including actual messages that they were replying to, or they have chat windows open. In fact, a little feud started a few years ago amongst a person who had left their email open, and the person who sent out email, pretending to be the owner, from their opened email account. Just fun messages, nothing mean. Now, I'm not condoning the emailing masquerade, but I think that the account owner should have been more careful and guarded their privacy by shutting down the account. Not to mention the fact that the person rather callously assumed that their business was so important that it deserved to remain, as is, on the terminal, as if no one else could possibly need that computer.

It doesn't matter if you will be right back--someone is going to read what is on your screen. They are going to find about your marks, how unhappy you are with a professor or your boss, and your pet names for your hunk o'burning love.

During a job search, it is better to act with greater discretion, so either avoid emailing from shared terminals or make darn sure that you never walk away--for a coffee or to the bathroom--with your email, Facebook or LinkedIn accounts open for all and sundry. Protect your business a little better, and remember that your workplace is letting you use that terminal, it's not yours.