Even if there is no company policy, it is still considered bad etiquette to use computers at work for personal business or for frivolous purposes. Peggy Post, the great-granddaughter-in-law of the famous Emily Post, writes in Emily Post's Etiquette, 17th Edition that "in the workplace, your employer's e-mail system is meant for business messages-not office gossip, the latest jokes, or personal rants."
Robin Thompson, owner of Etiquette Network and the Robin Thompson Charm School, agrees. She says, "If you are at work, you are supposed to be doing work." If you allow yourself to read and reply to personal e-mail at work, the amount of time you spend on that can get out of control. "Let's say you have ten to thirty coworkers, and everybody forwards an e-mail to you. Think how many e-mails you would be getting every day that are not business-related." A joke here and a joke there might not seem like much, but e-mail has a tendency to take on a life of its own, and soon you could be wasting hours a day. It's good to be disciplined and nip the problem in the bud.
Thompson says, "I work on my computer all the time, and I tell my associates and my friends not to send me cute e-mails or recipes. I don't have time to read them. I think companies should limit personal e-mail, because it does take up a great deal of time. I am not saying work has to be drudgery all the time, but it is not the place for cute e-mails and jokes. They tie up the system and take up a lot of time."
Thompson tells her employees that when they receive e-mails that aren't work-related, they should forward them to their home e-mail addresses. She thinks this is "something companies need to discuss. They don't need to dictate. They just need to strongly suggest that their employees limit the time they spend on personal e-mails and send them to their home e-mails instead."
Some employers do allow employees to read and send personal e-mails and to use the internet for personal use, as long as the employees limit it to a reasonable amount of time. Some companies may have specific policies on this, spelling out exactly what they consider "reasonable." For other companies, the arrangement may be more informal. Either way, if you're in this situation, good etiquette says that you shouldn't abuse the privilege.
Even if your employer allows you to send personal e-mail, you still have to be careful. Thompson says that you should "remember that e-mail is not private." If you send or receive e-mail using your employer's e-mail system, your employer has the right to retrieve those e-mails. Also, many people are not aware that merely deleting an e-mail through your mail program does not remove it permanently from the system. "The company you work for can pull up anything you've ever sent in an e-mail," Thompson says, "or any website you've ever visited. I think a lot of people don't realize that. The server has a copy of every e-mail that you've ever sent. So you need to be very careful with what you are sending, and to whom, because it never disappears."
Also, mistakes happen. The Career Planning guide at about.com says, "A friend of mine wanted to send a somewhat off color joke to some of her friends. She accessed the wrong mailing list in her address book and inadvertently sent it to several directors in her company, who luckily had a good sense of humor."
