Who Owns Your Emails?

Email is becoming a critical part of business communication and should be treated as business communication just like any other form of communication. You and your managers will need access to the communication now and in the future just like you access to letters and other paper documents in your files.

If your employees are using email while conducting your business you should own those email addresses.  If you allow your employees to set up their own emails on free services such a G-mail, Yahoo, Hot Mail or even on a service provider they use at home then they own the email and all the records associated with that address.

If the employee can change the password and block your access from any computer then you may lose critical correspondence if they become disgruntled or need to be terminated.

I am associated with a company that allowed an outside sales rep to use an email he set up on his home system. The email name did not use the name of the company but it did use the product name and implied that it was a company email. The employee was terminated for cause.  Many if not most of the email address he was using were stored not on the company computer but on the email program on the service providers server.  The addresses and communications were lost to the company and not available to his replacement.

 He kept the email, after all he owned it, and would answer emails sent to him from people who thought he was still with the company.  By the time the company discovered the problem a great deal of damage was done. It is likely the company will never know exactly how much. 

If your company uses email and if it does not now it likely will soon set it up on a server where you have access and control. It is a small investment to prevent a large problem.

© Thomas Robinson Sept 2010