Regularly, I receive complaints from individuals who didn’t receive some mailing or special offer. 80-90% of the time I take one look at their email address and immediately recognize the problem – They’re using their employer’s email address for personal business. Wow!

In the personal email world, we rarely have any email filters (other than SPAM) and usually receive everything emailed to us. But the corporate world is different. Corporate IT managers work to ensure only work-related email gets to employees. My former employer blocked Facebook, Match.com, Yelp and a whole host of non-business sites. This is done for two reasons, to keep unrelated email traffic off the internal networks, and to prevent employees from wasting too much time on non-work activities.

Personal email doesn’t look like “work” to an IT manager. For starters, it frequently has misspellings, or long forwarding chains, or includes multiple pictures and icons – It just doesn’t look like business and it’s fairly easy to filter.

People who use their corporate email account don’t realize the potential problems they’re creating. When they leave the job they lose their emails and email directory, and I’ll bet even though they signed an email acknowledgement form, they still think IT would never snoop on their emails. Baloney, my former employer did. And I know another that flagged emails destined for outside the company that contained secret program names. We chuckled when the filter would intercept an innocent email containing the name  “Harpoon” or “Dolphin.”

Yeah, I know I’m whizzing into the wind. People are going to continue to use their faa.gov and ibm.com addresses for personal mail and nothing I say or do will stop it. But at least I feel better now.