An employee sued the company for discrimination. After the suit was filed, the company archived everything saved on her work computer to preserve evidence.

The saved files included e-mails she sent via a personal, password-protected account. The company didn’t access the account directly, but copies of the messages had been automatically saved to her browser’s cache.

Some of the e-mails were conversations between the employee and her attorney, which contained evidence the company felt would help its case.

After the employer presented the messages in court, the employee claimed her rights to privacy and attorney-client privilege had been violated.

The company argued the employee had no such rights — its computer use policy stated that anything done on workplace computers could be monitored.

But the court disagreed. The judge ruled the employee had a “reasonable expectation of privacy,” because the policy didn’t mention that e-mails sent using a personal account would be saved to her hard drive.

It didn’t matter that she sent the e-mails at work — since the account was password-protected and not administered by the company, she reasonably assumed the company wouldn’t be able to read them.

Add to that the fact that the e-mails were between the employee and her lawyer, and the court ruled the company was at fault when it read the messages and tried to submit them as evidence.

What can companies monitor?

In most cases, whether monitoring is legal or not comes down to one question: Who owns the e-mail?

In other words, are the messages stored on the company’s network or by a third party (as is the case with personal accounts, like Yahoo and Gmail)?

While employers are normally within their rights to monitor employees’ work e-mail, courts will usually draw the line when the data’s stored by a third party.

Also, keep in mind:

• Have a clear-cut computer use policy – Employees can also win in court when they show they have a “reasonable expectation” of privacy. So inform all employees that their Web use at work will be monitored — and think twice before conducting any monitoring that isn’t clearly mentioned in the policy.
• Train managers – Some supervisors will go to great lengths when they suspect an employee of wrongdoing. But they should be warned that an investigation could become an invasion of privacy.

Cite: Stengart v. Loving Care Agency

Change the default font of your e-mail system.

That’s what Diane Blohowiak, director of computing at the University of Wisconsin Green-Bay, recommends.

To save money when students print e-mails, the school announced it was changing the default font in students’ e-mails from Arial to Century Gothic.

That font uses 30% less toner than Arial, Blohowiak says.

A survey by Accenture of 5,595 employees and students under age 25 found that communication among this generation is shifting away from e-mail and toward even more instant alternatives.

So how are they communicating? According to the survey, they increasingly use real-time alternatives to e-mail, such as text or instant messaging. While their older counterparts may spend six hours or more on work-related e-mail, mid-millenials spend only about four.

Apparently, having access to the latest technology is a big enough factor that young folks will consider it when they’re deciding where to work — 52% U.S. “millenials” told Accenture that technology features prominently in their employer decision. The study found that this new generation wants to choose what technologies they use.

For a closer look at the Accenture study, visit here.

The messages are made to look like they’re from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announce the start of a “State H1N1 vaccination program.” Readers are told they need to create a “vaccination profile.”

But when recipients click the link in order to do so, it leads them to a phony CDC page that installs malware on their computer, says security provider AppRiver.

Warn users about this scam and, of course, remind them not to click links in suspicious e-mails.

Web mail is often free, or offered at low-costs with features tailored to small businesses. But e-mail may be too important to entrust to a free or cheap Web-bases system, warns Roger Matus, CEO of e-mail archiving firm Inboxer.

Potential pitfalls include the risk of downtime. For example, Google’s Gmail made headlines after a few recent outages lasted several hours.

Also, most of these services give users little recourse if messages are lost — which can hurt the bottom line if, for example, messages to and from potential customers or clients don’t get through. Gmail’s service agreement says Google is not responsible for “any damages or loss of profit or harm to business reputation that results from use of the service.”

Our conclusion: Gmail (and others like it) are fine for home use, but if e-mail is critical to your business, you may want to spend the money for a more strictly managed system.

That’s what recently happened to a bank employee in Wyoming. When attempting to e-mail his boss, he accidentally entered the wrong Gmail address and didn’t realize until after he’d sent it.

The e-mail contained an attachment with info about 1,325 individual and business customers, including names, addresses, social security or tax ID numbers, and loan information, the Daily Examiner reports.

The bank went into panic mode and e-mailed the mystery recipient, asking him or her to delete the message without reading. When no one responded, the company asked Google about the status of the account. Google refused to give any information, claiming users’ privacy rights.

So the bank filed court papers demanding Google cooperate. The papers were filed “under seal” (i.e., not open to the public”), because the bank didn’t want to “needlessly panic” its customers before finding out if someone actually read the e-mail with the sensitive attachment.

The court refused to keep the case a secretive. Which is why customers get to read about the potential identity in the paper, rather than hear it from the company.

LotusLive iNotes will feature hosted, on-demand e-mail, calendar and contact management. Price per user: $3  per month,  a few bucks cheaper than Google Apps Premier Edition, which has a pricetag of $50 per user per year.

IBM’s pitch: With web-based e-mail, all  employees get real-time e-mail access from any computer or other device with a Web connection. And you get IBM’s reputation for security to boot.

As web-based interface, LotusLive  e-mail accounts are enabled with POP, authenticated SMTP and IMAP capabilities for use with e-mail clients such as Lotus Notes or Microsoft’s Outlook.

For companies looking to save money by moving to Software as a Service (SaaS) and having someone host their e-mail, this new offering will serve as good competition to both Google and Microsoft Exchange.

IBM’s assuring customers of both security and privacy for their e-mail accounts — and they’re putting their name behind the offering.

While nobody expects LotusLive iNotes to be a game changer, the entry of IBM into the hosted e-mail service business promises to keep other forces in the marketplace on their toes.

Here’s what happened in one recent court case:

An employee quit his job to run a consulting firm with his wife.

A few weeks before his resignation, he e-mailed several sensitive documents — including financial records, customer lists, marketing research and Web site data — to his personal account. Also, two months after the employee quit, an IT administrator discovered that someone was logged in to the company’s network using the ex-employee’s username, which had never been deactivated.

The employee never denied sending himself copies of confidential information to use for his consulting business. So when the company tried to take legal action, why did a court toss the suit?

Because the employee was given free access to the documents.

The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act allows penalties for people who commit fraud by accessing a computer “without authorization.”

The employee was allowed access to the information he took (he needed it for his job), and the company had no policies or signed agreements requiring him to keep the info confidential. Therefore, the judge ruled, he was not acting without authorization.

As for logging in to the network after he quit, the company couldn’t prove it was the ex-employee, rather than someone else who knew his username and password. (Both pieces of data were saved on a computer that at least two other employees could access.)

Steps to take now

Data theft by departing employees is a big issue today, when laid off employees are desperate for ways to appear more valuable to prospective employers.

Here are some steps the employer in this case could’ve taken before the theft:

1. written a confidentiality agreement to keep employees from using information obtained at work to help another business, and
2. removed the employee’s network access as soon as his resignation took effect.

But there is a way you can help your users avoid this mistake.

In most e-mail programs, the Reply and Reply All buttons are right next to each other. They also look alike, so they’re often mistaken for one another.

What to do: Most programs also let you customize your toolbar so you can rearrange or even remove certain buttons.

For example, in Microsoft Outlook 2007:

1. Click on the “Tools” menu at the top and select “Customize…” from the drop-down list
2. Select the “Commands” tab and click the button that says “Rearrange commands”
3. In the new window that appears, click the button next to “Toolbar”
4. Find “Reply to All” in the list underneath and use the “Move Up” and “Move Down” commands to change its position, or click “Delete” to remove the button from the toolbar altogether.

If the button is removed, users can still reply to everyone by finding “Reply to All” in the “Actions” menu.

That’s exactly what happened to Vicki Walker, former controller for a New Zealand health care company. Her boss fired her for sending “confrontational” e-mails.

For example: One message advising her staff on how to fill out claim forms contained some text in all capitals, and well as some text in bold and colored red.

Walker took the company to court for wrongful termination (New Zealand employees can only be fired for cause). The company defended its action by arguing that she caused “disharmony in the workplace.”

But the court didn’t buy it and awarded Walker $17,000. Annoying, yes, but misusing the caps lock key wasn’t a serious enough offense for termination.