:confused: Can anyone (including my employers) read Emails I send to external Email addresses from Hotmail or Gmail?? (sent from my work computer & obviously not including the intended recipient/s)

The answer is; its possible. Any traffic sent over your employers network, can be captured and read. Depending on the size of the network, it may not be practical to do so. Its less likely, but still possible for someone out on the Internet to read your e-mails. Anything sent out bounces from router to router until it reaches its destination. There could be utilities camped on the routers capturing the data packets. But again, the sheer volume of the traffice make it very unlikely that your mails would be read.

Your boss, the people who own the company are allowed to view any and all emails, any and all web searches. On my computer at work for example, my company would know every web site I visit during the working day. ( that is how we caught someone that was looking at porn instead of working)

And yes they can have programs in the machines, that will save and copy every incomming and outgoing email to any of their machines.
** and there is a new law ( court ruling) that companies have to save all email correspondance that is related to the company for years, so most companies in the US will have to have programs to save emails from their computers)

Fr_Chuck,

Just to clarify, there is indeed a law that allows companies to save all emails but that is aimed at the mail that goes through the company's email servers. For Web Mail content one would need to "sniff" the network traffic to capture the email content otherwise all they would have are URLs to webmail sites.