Have you been using your office computer to email love notes to your significant other? There is a chance that it might end up on your boss’s table. The company’s official email reader — who has access to whatever you do on your computer, even if it be through a personal email ID — has been mandated to stop all such misuse.

It’s rampant. In the US, where email in offices has been around for much longer than in India, companies have been getting tough. Over half the companies surveyed by the American Management Association and the ePolicy Institute say they fire people for email and Internet abuse. More relevant from the employee point of view is that 43 per cent of companies monitor workers’ email. Of this, 40 per cent have a human watchdog going through the mail.

A recent msnbc.com survey on email usage in the workplace revealed that 14 per cent of office workers send or receive personal emails constantly. Another 31 per cent do so very often. More than 50 per cent selected “sometimes” or “occasionally”. The principled abstainers amounted to just 9.3 per cent.

Another survey by email marketing company edesigns .co.uk studied the “bad email habits” of men and women. The survey discovered that most office romances start from emails. Over a third of all men surveyed admitted to spending more than 40 minutes of each working day flirting or gossiping via email. Their female counterparts are more circumspect; only 13 per cent of women used email to flirt with colleagues.

It’s not just the waste of time and money. Emails sometimes get out of confinement and traverse the world. A famous saucy email was that sent by Claire Swire to boyfriend Bradley Chait, a lawyer. The subject line read: “Yours was yum” and the contents, however you want to interpret that, are best left to the imagination. Chait forwarded it to six of his colleagues. In a very short time it was around the world. Did Swire, who became the butt of lewd jokes internationally, realise that she was blowing it by emailing Chait?

Another disaster story —also saucy — is that of Richard Phillips, a London solicitor earning £100,000 a year, who sent an email to his secretary demanding £4 to dry clean his trousers. The secretary had apparently dropped tomato sauce on them. There was a subsequent email complaining that the money had not been paid.

What’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. The secretary — 50 plus Jenny Amner — finally responded, but with a copy to 250 people working in the office. “With reference to the email below, I must apologise for not getting back to you straight away but due to my mother’s sudden illness, death and funeral I have had more pressing issues than your £4. I apologise again for accidentally getting a few splashes of ketchup on your trousers. Obviously your financial need as a senior associate is greater than mine as a mere secretary.” That email, with humourous additions by people it passed through, made it to Net infamy. Phillips later resigned.

Both Chait and Phillips couldn’t keep their pants on, albeit for different reasons.

To avoid such problems companies need an email use policy. Writing in PersonnelToday.com, Malcolm Etchells outlines what companies need do.

• Never look for an employee doing wrong, look for wrong and then investigate suspect employees.

• If you have acceptable policies in place regarding email, you must have email monitoring.

• Ensure employees are informed of acceptable usage policies, and that these are enforced.

• Proactively monitor email by searching random emails for key phrases or words to highlight suspicious or non-productive activity.

• Ensure users use external email (for example, Hotmail) outside working hours and use corporate email during working hours.

Indian companies are only now waking up to the email menace. They should. The email of the species is more dangerous than both mail and female.

What your inbox says about you

The Perfectionist: You have a Pavlovian attachment to your inbox. Every time the computer trumpets the arrival of a new email, the Perfectionist stops to check on it, immediately responding to the message, then archiving or deleting it. While you are likely to be highly organised, responsible and responsive, you are always interrupting yourself to check email and constantly break your workflow.

The Procrastinator: You know who you are. You have no system of inbox organisation and probably feel a sense of dread or guilt (or both) whenever you open your email. You frequently misplace messages and waste a lot of time searching for them. Surprisingly, many Procrastinators suffer from over-politeness. They feel they need to respond at length to each email.

(Source: Clea Badion, Robert Half International)