The PC Corner

by John Qualls
February 2002

Caveat Corporate E-Mailer

How many of you have received a personal e-mail from a friend with something like the following at the bottom?

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WARNING: All e-mail sent to and from this address will be received or otherwise recorded by the XYZ corporate e-mail system and is subject to archival, monitoring or review by, and/or disclosure to, someone other than the recipient.
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I have received numerous such e-mails containing off-color jokes, chain e-mails, complaints about bosses and working conditions, attached resumes of friends surreptitiously looking for another job, and other choice tidbits. None of these people would dream of sending these e-mails to their bosses or to the corporate HR department, yet they feel perfectly at ease using their corporate e-mail systems to conduct their personal business.

Back in the good old days before e-mail, most of us could use the phone on our desks for private calls and not worry about a recording being made. Unfortunately, these days are behind us. In the brave new world of corporate e-mail, the odds are that copies of any incoming and outgoing mail using your corporate e-mail address are archived by your company's server.

The real question isn't the archiving - it's what happens to the archived copies. The sheer volume of daily transactions gives some protection, but it would be foolish to count on volume to hide an indiscrete communication - either incoming or outgoing. You should always assume that copies are being kept, although not every company includes a warning message such as the one earlier. You also have to assume that these copies are sometimes read.

With the prevalence of free e-mail accounts on the web, and with every information service provider offering an account along with their service, there is no good reason to use your corporate e-mail address and account for personal e-mails. One of the web-based e-mail services, such as Yahoo or MSN's HoTMaiL, is a good alternative - I have an account with both. There are many advantages with these services; you can conveniently access them from anywhere in the world, you can filter and delete spam without having to download it (a real time savings when you have a slow connection), and you can read and compose e-mails either via a web browser or an e- mail program such as Outlook Express (OE) or Eudora.

Such flexibility makes it easy to access your personal account while at work. Of course, you are taking a risk of interception, but it is minimal. Interception is only possible if the company is actively monitoring your keystrokes and the contents of the web pages and files that you load/download during the course of the day. Such intrusive monitoring is still not widespread - at least, I hope it isn't.

In my case, I prefer to use Outlook Express for my e-mail, rather than use a web-based service via a browser. This is particularly the case for correspondence that I need to save on my own computer at home, rather than on the e-mail service's website. Thus, I have two problems - transferring my personal e-mail from my work machine to my home machine, and making sure that my private communications remain private.

For starters, I immediately delete any e-mail that I don't need to keep. However, for personal e-mails that I want to take home from work, I use the following procedure:

It was first necessary for me to locate my OE "Inbox" and "Sent Items" folders on the hard drives of both my work and home computers. This was easy to do - just click the Start button, select Find, select Files or Folder, and enter "Inbox.dbx" (without the quotes) as the file name to look for. OE stores its folders and their e-mail contents as files - one file per folder, with the folder name as the first part of the file name and ".dbx" as its extension. All OE ".dbx" files are stored in the same subdirectory; however, the subdirectory that OE uses is different on each my two computers, since I am running Windows 2000 on my work computer and Windows 98 on my home machine. When I found the subdirectory on each of my machines, I set up a shortcut to it on each desktop. This greatly simplifies the following steps.
Whenever I have files I want to take home with me, either files I have received or those I have sent, I simply copy the "Inbox.dbx" and/or "Sent Items.dbx" files to a floppy disk, and take them home with me. Keep in mind that all of the e-mails remain intact in the OE "Inbox" and/or "Sent Items" folders. If there is something sensitive, you might want to go back and delete the relevant e-mails from each. Don't forget to then delete them from the "Deleted Items" folder, where OE places them after they are initially deleted. However, keep in mind that these files can normally only be accessed by someone using your machine directly.
When I get home, I copy the file(s) to the appropriate subdirectory on my home machine. Copying the two files from the floppy to my home computer replaces all of the old e-mails in the "Inbox" and "Sent Items" folders with the new e-mails from work. Because of this, I always make sure that I never leave old e-mails that I want to save in these two folders.

This may sound like a lot of work, but it becomes routine after a few times. Admittedly, there is still a chance of your personal mail being intercepted, but it is minimal when compared with receiving personal e-mail via your corporate e-mail account. Also, remember that a copy of any e-mail may be kept by the receiving party and/or that party's company.

If I am on the road and using a computer on a temporary basis, it's really too much trouble setting up OE with the necessary POP3/SMTP information in order to use it with Yahoo. In these cases, I grit my teeth and use Yahoo's browser-based service to send and receive e-mails. I keep copies of any important outgoing mail. When I get back to Riyadh, I can then download this mail into OE. The incoming mail is, of course, no problem, as OE downloads everything it finds in Yahoo's "Inbox". In order to download my sent mail, I first have to transfer it from my Yahoo "Sent Items" folder to my Yahoo "Inbox". I can then download it and sort through it in OE.

I'm sure there are probably simpler ways to handle the personal e-mail problem at work, and I would appreciate hearing from you if you know of any. Just drop me an e-mail at jhqualls@yahoo.com.