An Email Policy for Your Employees

5. Monitoring Email

There are legal restrictions on how you can monitor employees' use of email, although this remains a grey area.

You must use your policy to inform employees about how you will monitor emails, and for what purposes. You should include a clause on email monitoring in your employment contracts. If you fail to do so, you will need to get consent if you want to perform checks.

5.1 Tell employees how email traffic is monitored.

• If you use monitoring software to produce a log of sent and received emails, you should make employees aware of this.

5.2 Explain that you reserve the right to read individual emails.

You may inspect individual emails for 'specific business purposes', including:

• Establishing the specific content of transactions and other important business communications.
• Making sure employees are complying both with the law and with your internal policies.
• Preventing abuse of your telecoms system.
• Checking emails when employees are on leave.