[silvarilon]

Sure. Everyone says that. And it's true... as far as it goes.

Here in Australia, at least, there are still laws against reading someone's email, even if it's their work email. The laws set reasonable bounds - in simple terms, the company (or representative for the company) can read the email as long as there is a reasonable job-related reason for it.

So I (being a tech) can read someone's email to investigate their claims that they aren't getting all their email (for example, to verify if new emails are arriving in their inbox)

I couldn't legally read their email just to see what they're up to, even though "the company owns it"

I could probably *delete* their email, without reading it, because the company owns it.

There was a case recently where someone was suing their company for wrongful dismissal - the company used information gained from reading their email (where they had discussed legal options with their lawyer prior to the dismissal, proving bad intent...) and that evidence both got dismissed from court, and used as evidence for another case about them illegally reading the email.

It was interesting, because the company did read the email to protect their own business. The courts found against the company because, although they were reading the email to find out information that is related to the company, they were not looking for *company* correspondance. So even if you use your work email for your personal emails, you still have some legal protection (at least in Australia) against people reading them.

What I take from this is that the company would have been fine to read his email if they were looking for work-related emails, and could have incidentally seen emails to his lawyer. But they didn't have a legitimate reason to be looking in the first case, since they didn't have a reason to be reviewing his work-related emails.

I know there are companies that review emails - and I know there are legitimate cases where that is necessary. I'm not sure of the legalities (since we don't do that here) but I suspect that the users need to be informed and aware that their email is being reviewed, and they probably also have a requirement to remind/inform the user if personal email is getting reviewed. (i.e. if you send an email to your mother, they should probably bounce it back saying "Please don't send personal mail through this system")

Regardless of user agreements, there are still certain privacy rights that the courts will uphold.

Of course, what those specific rights are will vary from country to country. My intention isn't to get into specifics, just to provide a few examples of "over the line" and "this is acceptable" - the intention is just to illustrate that the system admin does have some legal obligations.