Let’s say you leave a company and discover two years later that the company is keeping your former company email address active. A reader of TechRepublic.com recently asked about that interesting situation, so the head blog editor, Toni Bowers, sought an answer from Lawrence Graves, a partner in the New Hampshire-based firm of Coolidge & Graves, specialists in intellectual property law. Here’s how Atty. Graves answered:
“The company/employer owns all data on its hardware, including email archives. The employee has no rights at all in his e-mail identity. Ordinarily, as a courtesy, employers tend to keep old accounts active for a limited time in order to avoid rejecting business-related communications, and forward personal emails to the former employee. There would potentially be an issue if the employer used the former employee’s email to perpetuate a false impression that the employee remained with the company, but simply mining the incoming traffic is certainly within the employer’s rights.”
If you find yourself in this situation, you might want to contact the company in the event that somebody there simply forgot to disable your old email address. Stranger things have happened.