It allows some employees to work from home, conduct business after hours and while traveling, and transmit information more efficiently, without the unnecessary chitchat of a phone conversation. The law regarding E-mail is still developing, but so far the courts have held that employers may snoop through workers' electronic missives at will. It's becoming a popular practice. The number of employers at major U.S. firms who say they monitor E-mail has nearly doubled over the past two years to 27 percent in 1999, according to preliminary results of a study by the American Management Association. Employees who have deleted their E-mail are surprised to learn it is not really gone.
Phantom messages reside in a computer's delete folder until it's excised as well.
And even then, computer specialists known as forensic analysts can often excavate ancient E-mail from a computer's hard drive. So it's easy to find yourself in an Orwellian world pretty quickly. The couple now live in New York, where both are enrolled in law school.