email monitoring

Hey guys, I said something stupid in an email. I knew firms do monitor emails. Does anyone know if the monitoring is in real time or back logged? It has been a couple of months, is it safe to assume the email is not a problem at this point?

10 Comments
 
"Yourock"

Thanks a lot for the comments! It's has been couple of months, but I am worried if it has been flagged but not yet reviewed? Trying to decide if I need to come clean and get to the front of this.

Can you elaborate a bit on what you said? Either way if it is a couple months in the past now then you stand a good chance of being ok. There is content scanning of both the email itself and attachments so I tend to believe if it was a true "game over" moment you'd already be gone.

Get your facts first, then you can distort them as you please.
 

Thanks a lot for the comments! I sent out that stupid email about two and half months ago by mistake and it has been bothering me since. I agree with all the comments that the scanning of the emails is real time. Just worried that maybe the email is flagged but have not been reviewed yet. That was incredibly stupid of me and thanks everyone for your help!

 
Best Response

If you haven't been flagged by IT word filters already, I think the only risk is that whoever you sent it to uses it against you, or forwards it and it lands in the lap of someone who uses it against you.

An example which may be relevant - we had a person in my team who was underperforming significantly over a long and sustained period and just didn't seem to give a shit. We wanted to fire him. HR made us have meetings with him, set performance targets with him and generally manage him out over a few months, even though we were fairly certain he'd never reach those targets (and he never got close).

The person also had severe shortcoming in professionalism and it was almost certain he'd put stuff in e-mail which was not workplace appropriate (less breaching business ethics, more just being unprofessional).

On simple internal policies breach level, we'd be almost certain to find that he'd mailed internal documents to his personal e-mail address at least once or twice - not for the purposes of evil, yet would still be a clear policy breach offence.

However, despite the clear shortfalls in this person, the fact that it was quite apparent that we'd have to get rid of him and the likelihood we'd find e-mails that would justify immediate termination in his outbox, no one suggested we look at his e-mails - neither us nor HR.

Unless we thought someone was leaking inside information, it's just not something we'd think of doing or want to do.

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