The e-mail exchange sounded like a heart-to-heart chat, the kind of chats friends have in confidence during rough times. After getting in a big “dust-up” at Washington State University, Steven Hoch, who was then provost, e-mailed a former colleague at the University of Kentucky: “I still hate it here, but I’m feeling better.” His friend wrote back: “Sorry about the schmucks.”

That e-mail exchange was not confidential, however. It was public record, because Hoch works for a public institution.

Workers in private companies should be careful with e-mails, too. The public won’t likely have access to them, but your boss will. Messages sent from a workplace computer are not considered private. According to the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse: “If an electronic e-mail system is used at a company, the employer owns it and is allowed to review its contents.”

And deleting private, sensitive e-mail doesn’t keep it from an employer’s eyes. Most companies back up all computer data in permanent files.

E-mail monitoring has been challenged several times in court; employers have prevailed. In 1996, for instance, the U.S. District Court in Eastern Pennsylvania ruled that the Pillsbury Company was within its rights to fire an employee who had misused the company’s e-mail system.

The court wrote: “The company’s interest in preventing inappropriate and unprofessional comments or even illegal activity over its e-mail system outweighs any privacy interest the employee may have in those comments.”

E-mail found its way into workplaces in the 1980s, but the technology was mostly limited to internal communication. It took the explosion of the Internet in the 1990s to make e-mail ubiquitous. And though most employees learn in workplace orientation that e-mails are not private property, employees continue to treat it as such.

In the private sector, inappropriate e-mails can get you fired. In the public sector, they can get you fired – and embarrassed on the front pages of newspapers. In 2007, The Spokesman-Review successfully sued for e-mail records from the Kootenai County prosecutor’s office. The e-mails were rife with sex jokes, nudity, sexual innuendo and suggestions of inappropriate workplace relations. It was an embarrassing glimpse into a workplace seemingly gone wild.

When you call companies that rely on the telephone for customer interaction you often here this message: “Your phone call may be monitored for quality assurance purposes.”

Maybe this message should be posted prominently in every workplace: “Your e-mails may be monitored for any reason. Be careful what you say. Your future here may depend on it.”