In my opinion, as long as an employer has legitimate business justifications, e-mail monitoring is justified. Examples of justifications: the company’s reputation, employee productivity and preventing employee disclosure of company secrets. However, the moment it is clear that the e-mail communications are of a private nature only (e.g. when the employee uses the sub-folder ‘private’) and there is no reason to believe that such e-mails affect the company’s legitimate interests in any way, the privacy rights should prevail.

As far as your question is concerned there is no conclusive case-law yet. I recommend that employers draft a detailed and clearly written electronic communications policy to be distributed to the employees before any monitoring begins.

Kind regards,

Karel Frielink
Attorney / Lawyer

I was wondering if you could provide me some information about emplyees privacy regarding internal e-mail.

Explanation: an e-mail send by the employee to a colleague in confidentiality was read by system administrator.

Thank you in advance for your information.

Best regards,

Jeanette Hooker-Soliana