E-mail Privacy

[Leonard Erickson]

conca at handel.cs.colostate.edu (michael vincen conca) writes:

<Aproximately 1 month ago, a certain employee was advised that he/she was
<was acting in an inappropriate manner and that they needed to make 
<certain adjustments in their attitude.  A meeting was held between the head
<manager and this employee in which the above issue was discussed.  All of
<this was summarized in a memo which was E-mailed to the employee.

<Yesterday, this employee was terminated.  He/she was allowed to gather
<their things and purge all of their personal files from the system.  Today,
<my boss asked if it would be possible to retrieve this employee's E-mail
<off of backup, find the memo, and print it out in case it was needed as 
<evidence in a possible court case.

<Now for the tough questions.
<	Is this legal?  Is this ethical?  If this person still worked
<here, I would immediately refuse.  But since they don't, do they still
<have any rights to their E-mail?  Right now, I am leaning towards refusing
<because I think a person's E-mail is theirs, regardless of their status
<with the organization.  Anyone have any other opinions on this?

You are overlooking one detail. The *sender* of the email has rights to it
too. He *should* have kept a copy, but since he didn't, retreiving any
messages *from* him *to* the terminated employee is perfectly legal. 
As is frequently pointed out on the net, the *sender* has copyright on email!

I'm not a lawyer, but I'd say all you *should* need is permission of
*one* of the parties to retrieve the message. Anything after that is
up to the court. And at the very least, *I* would lock up that backup
tape along with logs and the like to enable you to "prove" that it is
indeed what you claim it to be. Remember, the lawyers on *both* sides
may get interested in this, and I'd hate to have to reply to a court order
with "Sorry, that tape got re-used yesterday." 


-- 
Leonard Erickson			leonard at qiclab.uucp
personal:	CIS: [70465,203]	70465.203 at compuserve.com
business:	CIS: [76376,1107]	76376.1107 at compuserve.com