I live in Pennsylvania. A co-worker of mine found my personal (not work related at all) email password and used it to read my emails without my knowledge or permission. She is divorcing and found some slightly inappropriate emails between her husband and I. Can she use these in court? Is it illegal to read, print, and share my emails with co-workers?

First off you should not have been using your work place for personal use. You can guarantee you will get in trouble every time you do something like that. You are just going to have to bite the bullet and just hope she does not try and use them to her advantage in a divorce action. This email stuff is too new to know what kind of laws there are about read, print, etc. but I'd be on the side of you let a $10 bill lying around on your desk at work, come back and it's gone and who are you going to blame? You for being the dumb bell who left it out for someone to be tempted to take in the first place.

You should consider yourself extremely lucky that your employer does not know about you using your email for personal use. Employers are coming down hard on inappropriate use of email, internet, etc for personal use. Some people are getting fired for this.

Don't you have a job to do, or do you just show up to look pretty? Let me guess, you're eye candy.

Thanks but maybe I wasn't clear. A co-worker did this but it did not happen at work. She got into my personal home account while she was at her home on her own computer. The problem is that she has taken my personal emails to work and involving other co-workers.

In that case it's a whole different color of horseflesh. How in the world could she get your password if she's at her home... unless she's reading the email you sent to him and she's reading his end of the email. Still don't understand just how she got password (hope you changed password by now LOL)

Personally I think email are a bane on mankind making it much too easy to snoop on other people.

I hope she's had her fun because if she tries to take these and work them to her advantage in the divorce - that's bordering on theft and blackmail (depending on just how she is using the emails) on her part unless she can prove that she has proper access to his email account (providing they have separate accounts). Kind of gets sticky here since like I said before this email stuff has not been around too long to have proper rulings and cases go to appellate courts for rulings on yet. My guess is if I looked online right now there would only be a handfull of rulings on emails and most would have to do with company emails and not personal stuff. I'm stumped for an answer for you.

Actually, what she did is illegal. The Electronic Communications Privacy Act ("ECPA") of 1986 and subsequent court decisions make the detection of contents of e-mail during transit illegal. Furthermore, if the intended recipient of the e-mail does not voluntarily distribute the e-mail to others, the contents are still regarded as private.

The exceptions to this would be if the e-mail sent were copyrighted. Few people put the copyright legend on their e-mail, but it does prohibit the recipient from distributing the e-mail unless he wishes to violate copyright laws. Another exception would be if your e-mail messages were on a server and not been distributed to their recipients. In that case there is not interception under the law.

The USA Patriot Act of 2001 weakens the privacy created by ECPA in that it allows the government to gain access to the header information in all e-mail sent by anyone to anyone in the United States. If the government believes that a sender constitutes a threat to the country, it can obtain the message body of all affected e-mail messages.

Although you have indicated that the e-mail was sent from home and not from work, you should be reminded that the courts have determined that e-mail sent through a company's computer system loses all privacy protections. Little lunch dates with a beau, snuggle talk with a lover, threats against your neighbor, etc. are all public information and can be obtained and read without any protection for personal privacy.

Your coworker's discovery of your password is not a stretch of credibility. If you are like most people, they tend to want to keep things memorable. So, they use the same passwords, the same user names, etc. In a small town where there is probably a single local ISP or in the case where people tend to use a large public e-mail provider like Yahoo, the server access information is freely available over the web. If the coworker ever saw your private e-mail address, the only thing left would be to learn the password. Usually, people are transparent enough that guessing one's password is not all that difficult.

Finally, this is the reason that people should N-E-V-E-R convey anything of importance using e-mail. Nothing financial, personal, etc. E-mail, when sent, is sent using clear text, meaning that it can be read with something as simple as Notepad. If you are on a cable Internet access system, it is like having a party line. Anyone with an Internet sniffer (freely available at more than a dozen Internet sites) can read your e-mail as it is being sent. The law may say that e-mail in transit is private, but unless I am living on a different planet, people break the law to suit their own objectives with the belief that their actions will fly under the legal radar.

As a suggestion, I would recommend that you consider using secure e-mail for everything you send. Secure e-mail costs money, but not much, perhaps $30-50/year. It encrypts everything so that it is absolutely undecypherable without having the decryption key. Unfortunately, secure e-mail often requires you to distribute the so-called "public key" of what is called an asymmetric key pair to the various recipients to whom you send mail, and the process of decryption is probably something that people born with all thumbs wouldn't like.

I am going to be releasing very shortly a secure e-mail system that can be used by anyone without the hassles of key management. It works just like regular e-mail, and it uses existing e-mail software. It is completely confidential, encrypted, and private, and it will cost less than $30/year. People you send such e-mail to can get the reader for free, or you can read the mail at a secured website. If you are interested in using it, go to www.youremailissafe.com to preview the product.