There's no such thing as "private" email in the workplace, and these two would have done well to remember that.

At my place of employ, secretaries routinely have unfettered access to their managers mailboxes, for the purpose of filing mail.

That's a silly position and you know it.

At work, everything you touch and use is *owned by the company*. If the company chooses to allow you to use the telephone system for personal calls, then that's their lookout; however it's worth remembering that telephone calls and email are not equivalent; if the email system goes down, I'm expected to *retrieve the data* from backup, whereas there's no persistent storage on a phone system (unless you take the pathological case of telephone workers like call centre operators and people on full-time helpdesks, where calls are routinely recorded for the purposes of training and anti-litigation ["no sir, our employee most definitely did NOT tell you to pour marmalade into your disk drive"]).

Just as corporate file servers are not a place to stash your private documents, nor is the email system a place to stash your innermost thoughts and feelings, and definitely not those of a salacious nature that you wish to share with your misogynistic buddies.

You will be interested to know, however, that unless stated otherwise, a company cannot monitor email or telephone calls without the employee's permission. At least in the UK - given the current state of US legislation, I'd be surprised if it isn't mandatory.

After all, your employee might be talkin' bout that all important Intellectual Property, right?

The debate on privacy really isn't helped by such muddying of the waters, Ashton.