Supervisor reading my emails

[Tryingtoconceive2years]

A bit of a back story a collegue/friend of mine had an altercation with someone at work via email. This involved the person emailing said friend some insults and she was majorly upset over it. I emailed DP about this on her permission as he is usually pretty good with this stuff.

I am covering the supervisor at the moment due to Ramadan and he is doing my role. I had used my computer earlier on in the day - had closed my emails at this point. (hotmail) my friend colleague saw him read the subject box of this email I had sent dp and click on it - I had replied to dp and checked after that when you reply it automatically goes back into your inbox.

What the fuck?!?

What is your employer's policy on this?
Are you allowed to access personal email accounts on a work computer or is this a work email address?

You forwarded a work email to your Hotmail personal account and then accessed your personal account at work.

You then failed to Exit the email program and clear your web browser history and effectively left the program open so that anyone passing could access it.

Do I have that right?

If so, you're in the wrong more than your supervisor is.

Yes on the personal email front as boss emails me to that email (he is located in another office)

I had excited the email and cleared my history - I assume he was going on hotmail to login himself.

*exited rather

I might add that even If i had left it open - the actual email was not open he clicked on that to read it

If equipment and email account useage is blurred it gets difficult for everyone without a clear policy. If he had any reason for thinking this was work related or that you were doing something out of order with work info, he could have a good go at justifying it.

Have I read this right, the supervisor logged back in to your Hotmail account?

you need to understand that nothing you do on a work computer is private

OnionKnight yes

How can he log in to your private hotmail account unless he knows your password?

you need to understand that nothing you do on a work computer is private

^this. Why access hotmail on the work pc at all? And boss using your personal email to contact you for work stuff is just weird - if you need a computer and email for your tone, why not have a work email?

I hope you don't deal with any confidential information at your work

Tone = role. Strange autocorrect!

Work computers are tools provided to do your work. You should assume nothing you do on them is confidential. Our IT policy states that a small amount of personal use in breaks is acceptable, but reminds us that nothing is guaranteed to be private

We have similar limited use rules, cannot send work to private email addresses and mark anything unrelated to work as Non work. Which is no guarantee it won't be looked at if a business risk or criminal behaviour is suspected.

you need to understand that nothing you do on a work computer is private

This. I am a sys admin. In the past, I've had to investigate which sites an employee has accessed from work because on an HR investigation. It's all logged. Key-logging is possible too.

Having said that, it's also a potentially disciplinary offence to access someone else's account - are you saying you access each other's accounts to do each other's work, rather than doing each other's work from your own account?

Do you have Hotmail set to log in automatically?

If it's for work, why aren't you using work email accounts to contact each other?

No, your supervisor shouldn't have read a private email (though without hearing his version of events, I'm prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt about being confused at which account he was in and just checking to see if it was a mail he needed to deal with or not,) but it sounds like you've got fairly duff security practices that he was able to do so in the first place. If you ficus on fixing that, it is far less likely that it would be possible for it to happen again.

Great advice from EBearHug

Working practices sound bizarre.

Work email = work use

Personal email = personal use but if using a company device to access need to accept IT etc can access

"Yes on the personal email front as boss emails me to that email (he is located in another office) "

Being located in another office is besides the point - the company should provide you both with a means to correspond that doesn't depend on your private hotmail accounts. it isnt' fair on anyone.