Do you Know this Toxic Emailer? Personal Penelope

Penelope checks her home e-mail account regularly, and uses the company email for personal things.

Many employees make the mistake of using their business email for personal reasons. Whether it’s emailing the babysitter to check on the kids or keeping up with college buddies, personal emails are scarcely warranted from your workplace email account.

Penelope’s Antidote:  Don’t do it.

A word to the wise: your employer owns your work email account, and has a legal right to every piece of information transmitted over its business network.  Even if deleted, sent emails can be “mined.” In addition, remember that emails can constitute a public record; this is yet another reason not to use them to transmit sensitive, argumentative, or personal information from your work account. Even merely accessing your personal email through your business’s internet system can be dangerous, as records and logs of those transactions can be accessed by the company.

Excerpted from Inbox Detox, Acanthus Publishing, 2009