You made me think. Maybe all those seminars and security discussions were in error with their take on the legal "ownership"; for lack of a better term, of and email sent through a company owned server.
Turns out it is Not an easy question. There are grey areas. The best I can tell we're both right.
Quoting my company's attorney: "The email message content remains the property of the author,
even if the email file becomes the property of the company."
Specifically regarding the filtering mail for spam (or any other reason: Filtering is considered intervention, on the level of what happens to the file, therefore it's OK to do. There are no laws in place that require a company to allow it's employees to send or receive any particular email. In other words, if I choose to I may legally filter email crossing my company's resources, (network, servers, etc.) in any manner or for any reason. Which makes sense, because the network resources are property of the company. The only thing I may not do is Intercept and alter, publish or redistribute the email content without permission of the owner of the content.
The really scary thing that we all need to be aware of is that, so far, there's no federal law that requires employers to notify employees that their communications are being monitored. Legislation was introduced in Congress in 1991 by Sen. Paul Simon, D-Ill., that would have required advance notification to both employees and customers of electronic monitoring. The bill, known as The Privacy for Consumers and Workers Act, prohibited undisclosed monitoring of rest rooms and dressing-room and locker-room facilities, except when the employer suspected illegal conduct. The bill, which was never passed, would have provided for fines for violations and permitted injured employees to sue for compensatory and punitive damages and attorneys' fees.
So as far as the general issues, we can both say we're right, but specifically regarding what I was talking about in this thread, which is spam filtering; I have every right to do it.
To be honest if anyone complained, I would put their email account in the bypass file so it doesn't get filtered. Then you'll see how quickly they come crawling back to me.
As far as server side filtering, for anything other than a small business; it's the only way. To have a separate spam-filtering app on each of my company's workstations is ridiculous. Why don
