Email also becomes a door through which productivity sapping games, jokes, hoaxes and other time wasters can eat up employees' time. In some cases these amusements can take up so much system memory that they will crash a system or bring it to a crawl. Intellectual Property Risks Email and Internet access allow company employees to download or share unlicensed software and other copyrighted material. Software introduced from outside also may corrupt systems and create incompatibilities among various software programs. Employees can use email to transmit confidential company information to competitors, customers, suppliers, and stock analysts and traders, all of which expose the company to loss of valuable trade secrets and intellectual property.
Email is notoriously unreliable.
Email, because of its informality, encourages bad judgment. Employees may be careless in composing and sending messages. Email is also prone to misaddressing, unauthorized and unaudited alteration of messages, and lack of authentication of the sender. All of these problems create substantial liability risks. Strategies To Reduce Risk Companies should adopt email and computer use policies.