Work email confidentiality

[Umbrelladilemma]

I work for a small company (

No you are right. All emails are retrievable and I am sure most employers would have their network backed up and accessible should they need to.

She is being very naive here.

Yes, assuming the email server is backed up regularly there is every chance they could be recovered. As a small firm you may well be using some kind of hosted email service where it's provided for you rather than having your own server?

More to the point, even if she deletes her copy, she's sending this stuff to several others. Any of whom could be keeping them all on file, she has no idea what they might choose to do with the information. Very unwise indeed.

I had a colleague who used to send a lot of joke emails that were offensive. They pulled his emails up for the past 5 years.
A warning was sent to all if anyone sends inappropriate emails over the work system we were to send a polite 'please do not send emails that are not business related'.

She's a fool. I hope you haven't replied to any of them?

Thank you for all the quick responses. Yes, I thought they could all be retrieved. And yes, it is also worrying that others have copies and are probably not as bothered about deleting them... or could even use them against her in the future. I will show her this thread!

She is an idiot. Firstly for slagging off the head of HR, and then for doing it on work emails, and then for thinking that she can just delete it when it is possibly the head of HR that would be able to access them.

The problem is that the emails could easily be forwarded to Herself!! Risk not that anyone has time to fish on servers for office gossip, but very easily to forward on purpose or by accident. Just too dodgy.

She's an idiot, and could be up for gross dismissal for misuse of the work email service, as well as bullying of a work colleague.

Look after your own interests her, each time she says anything respond saying 'please don't discuss not related work with me.'

a friend got caught out by this. She worked for a small ish manufacturing company.

She had to be on call to answer out of hours queries on a help desk type thing a couple of days a month, and they gave her a laptop so she could access the database and contact the suppliers etc for the clients that called.

One week there was an intermittent problem with the network so she emailed herself (to her personal email address) a spreadsheet of the most frequently used numbers so she could do her job without the needing the network, if it failed.

A couple of years later she got caught up in a whistleblowing incident, and scapegoated as a ringleader. A couple of days later, they sacked her for gross misconduct in the form of stealing confidential information.

Yep, they'd been through ALL the emails she'd ever sent, received or deleted
And found that one email. Even though it had been deleted.

I work for a very large company, a few years ago an email made it's way round several dozen employees eventually landing with someone who complained about the content (awful picture of dead body) and the snail was tracked through everyone who had forwarded it on, they were all sacked. Dozens of people lost their jobs that day but the company took the hit and moved on.

I wasn't involved. I had received the email but just closed it and deleted it. I had no part in forwarding it on so obviously wasn't sacked.

Everyone is very careful now.

She is a fool.
Never put in writing anything nasty about anyone.
It could find it's way back to them.

She is a complete idiot.

Yes I have worked for my firm for eight years and ALL emails are stored on the "ghost" hosting system.