News & Blog

Email Reporting – Things You See That You Probably Don’t Want To See

Jeff Laubhan – Waterford Technologies I was speaking with an existing client today who told me a story that I’ve heard before,

Jeff Laubhan – Waterford Technologies

I was speaking with an existing client today who told me a story that I’ve heard before, but was still shocked.

Our email archiving software  just captures data and allows companies to search. Typically, clients use our software re-actively though some organizations are proactive with monitoring. The IT Director at this medium sized company said he was forced to pull emails based on an employee complaint. It turns out that a female employee walked by a colleague’s cube and noticed very salacious offensive emails on his screen. She said she was concerned to their direct manager and the manager throughout the day walked by a few times to confirm the activity.

Even worse, the individual in question was using his work email. The manager went to HR who then went to IT to search the last week’s Email Reportingemail to see if there was action that needed to be taken. It turns out that the employee had sent and received over 1,200 emails in the past week to various craigslist accounts with the intention of developing an extra-marital relationship. Morals aside, this was an egregious misuse of company property – computer and email. Plus this was offending his female co-worker that sat in the cubicle next to him. It turns out the employee in question was deleting the emails every night and emptying his trash. Although some could have been found on the back-up tapes it might not be 100% accurate. Our software basically provided the evidence to fire the employee for cause.

Thanks to email reporting…

The HR department realizes that the environment might have become too lax and are putting together an initiative to revisit their policies, educate employees, and be proactive to curtail any suspicious activity that might be occurring.

Unfortunately in our business, this isn’t the first or probably the last time I’ll hear this type of story.