Legal Question in Technology Law in Louisiana

Re: E Mail violation by employer

First, I assume that your "employer" is the school system, or that's what it appears to be from your fact description. And based on your fact description (which I'm assuming is accurate and contains all of the important facts), I would seriously question if your employer has the right to copy your hotmail emails.

An employer does have the right to information that is stored on a computer that it owns, but which is used by an employee. However, hotmail accounts are based on servers maintained by Microsoft and I wouldn't see how an employer would have the right to keep copies of emails that an employee sent or received from an hotmail account.

Re: E Mail violation by employer

I disagree with the prior post. Email monitoring is generally legal. The issue generally is what did the employer tell the employee in advance. If the employer told the employee that emails would be monitored and recorded, then the employer tends to win these disputes. For a brief article on "Is EMail Monitoring Legal?", I refer you to http://www.redearthsoftware.com/email-monitoring-article.htm . Please note that the article is written by a provider of software for email monitoring.

In your situation, it seems clear that your employer has told you that you will be monitored. Knowing that, you have no reasonable expectation of privacy, I suggest you NOT pursue any action against your employer. You stand to lose the case and probably your job. The better approach is to send any sensitive emails from a computer you alone control. Then you can put on a firewall such as Zone Alarm to block the monitoring.