Most staff suspect snooping on personal e-mail – but keep sending it

Yahoo! UK polled 18,000 adults who have access to e-mail at work in what it says is the biggest survey of its kind. Its figures show that 61% think that the IT department reads their personal e-mail in secret; and 45% fear colleagues having a nose through their personal e-mail when they are out of the office or away from their desks.

Almost one in three office workers (31%) think that sending personal e-mail at work puts them in danger of suffering from "the Claire Swires effect" – a person they trust forwarding on a personal or intimate e-mail onto other people in the company.

But that doesn't stop them sending it. For, according to research by e-mail management firm Waterford Technologies, at least 35% of all corporate e-mail sent and received in the UK is non work-related, albeit its study was limited to just 30 organisations.

In one public sector body with 1,000 e-mail users, the figure was a staggering 70%. Waterford's study of the web sites visited by staff revealed that four of the top ten domain names were those of free ISPs such as Hotmail, Yahoo! and AOL, rather than business addresses.

Waterford's study also found that, on average, over 300 attachments per user are being stored in 'Sent Items' and 'Deleted Items' folders.

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