Peter Jay Salzman wrote:
I doubt that it's as rare as you seem to think. In particular, I have heard enough stories of bosses reading employees' emails to believe that at least some of them must be true. Especially since a company can be held liable for sexually harassing or otherwise inappropriate comments sent over company email: it would probably be unwise /not/ to check employee e-mails. However, I think it's very unsportsmanly not to at least ensure that everyone is acutely aware of the public nature of corporate e-mail.
It would seem easy for an ISP's system administrator to use the root
password to read the email of the ISP's customers. ( I know I can log in
as root on my Linux system and use the "more" command to read my
downloaded email.) Does anybody here believe that ISP system
administrator's ever do such a thing?
Yes, but in the same kind of way that 16 year old McDonalds employees spit into the hamburgers (or worse).
It's probably VERY rare.
The statistics are such that it would (probably) NEVER happen to you.
Also, consider that mail might also be read incidentally by a sysadmin trying to trace problems with the mail service or a mildly corrupted mailbox. Or just a BOFH-style sysadmin: I suspect there are plenty with the BOFH attitude, if not the BOFH skill.
Another case where I personally have read mail not intended for my eyes is when I have deemed it unacceptable to lose any mail sent to a particular domain, and have all mail not matching an actual mailbox sent to me. This helps catch misspellings and other problems, but if the mail is of a personal nature then I might rather have lost it...
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