I was a system administrator at my company, back in the day when disk storage was still quite expensive, so everyone was assigned a 100 MB quota for email storage. The company policy was that only “business critical” email should be retained beyond 60 days, so that 100 MB limit wasn’t a big deal for most people. We also had a policy that anyone requesting additional space could be granted an additional 100 MB of storage – no approval process required. But if you exceeded that 200 MB limit, it required your management’s approval and certification that the additional storage was required for legitimate business purposes. Outside the corporate legal team, our 30,000-person company had exactly zero people with over 200 MB of storage for their email.

It is important to also note that everyone with an email account signed a form stating that they had read and understood the corporate email policy, which included the above limitations, along with a bold face section that stated “Email is a corporate asset, and there is absolutely no expectation of privacy. Usage will be reviewed on a regular basis, to ensure compliance with this policy.” It went on to state that the corporate conduct policy would also apply to email usage, particularly with regards to issues of sexual harassment, hostile work environment, etc. The policy explicitly stated that violation of the email policy could result in immediate termination for cause.

Once a month, we ran an automated process that checked the amount of email storage each person in the company was using. If the person was within 10% of reaching their email limit, this process sent them an email (as though it came from me) notifying them that they were nearing the limit, and suggesting things that might help them reduce the size of their email file. It also reminded them that if they had a business necessity, they could request to have their email quota increased, along with the process for doing so. At the end of this process, I received a report, ranked in order of storage usage (largest to smallest). It was part of my job requirement to assist these folks with reducing their storage usage.

One month, I received a report that showed one particular user had gone from roughly 20 MB to 150 MB during that month. This was highly unusual, so it stood out to me. I personally contacted the user, who stated it was a business necessity that he keep all that email so I extended his quota to 200 MB. No problem.

The following month, I received another report that showed that same user was now using more than 450 MB of storage space. I again contacted the user, and he was adamant that he absolutely had a business requirement to keep all that email, and that he had already followed all my suggestions for reducing the size of his email storage.

Unbeknownst to him, I opened his email file (remember – no expectation of privacy – and used a view that listed all the email files, sorted by date. Oddly enough, he had nothing over 60 days old, yet still had a huge email file. So I then changed the view so that it sorted the files from largest to smallest. There were close to 100 emails from a single individual that were quite large, and they all contained attachments. I opened the largest one, and saw that the attachment was a GIF file (picture of some sort), and that the email itself was only one line: “You won’t believe this one!”

So I opened the attachment… Now, it’s important to know that I spent 8 years in the military, spent time overseas in areas where morality was viewed quite differently than “back home”, and would consider myself to be “hard to shock” when it came to human behavior. But what I saw in that GIF file was the most perverted, disgusting act between a man and a woman – far beyond anything I’d ever seen or heard of, and absolutely, definitely a clear violation of the corporate conduct policy. I spot-checked 3–4 more of the attachments, and while they were not quite as vile as the first one, were more of the same…

So, I made a full backup of the gentleman’s email file, and saved it to an archive disk, knowing that HR might need it in the event they chose to pursue termination. I then called the gentleman, and asked him if he was familiar with the corporate email usage guideline document (which, of course, he had signed). He said he was. I reminded him of the “no expectation of privacy” clause, and told him I had done a quick check of his email contents, and found quite a “collection” of emails from one particular person, all of which contained very large attachments which did not appear to be business-related. Mind you, I’m sitting at my computer, looking at his email file in real-time as he begins to erase things. He insists that I’m wrong – he has nothing non-business related in his file. I “froze” his access to delete email in the middle of this discussion, and asked “then why are you deleting all those ‘business-critical’ files?” I could hear him literally pounding on his keyboard.

Next he begins to swear at me (another workplace conduct violation) and threaten that he’s going to have my job. He tells me that I must have planted all those files, because they were not there earlier, and he had nothing to do with it. Apparently, he was a junior executive, with an overly inflated ego. He then told me he was going to call a meeting with my manager, to have me fired for violating his privacy, threatening him, and planting those files in his email.

I told him that was fine, but suggested he should also include his manager in the meeting, as I would be inviting the VP of HR, as well as the VP of Legal to the meeting. I reminded him that our email system encrypted every single email using the key of the sender and receiver, and that it was a trivial exercise to forensically prove who the sender and receiver were. I also pointed out that all email files are backed up every night, and that we keep those backups for 60 days (per company policy), so it would be easy for me to retrieve his email files for any day within that timeframe, and show the existence of the “material in question” for that entire time period during our “meeting” with HR and Legal. I reminded him of the part of the email policy that stated that violation of the policy could result in immediate termination, and then suggested that he should also notify the person who sent him those files (an employee of another division of our global corporation, but which used a different email system), and remind that person of the email policy as well, lest they suffer the same fate.

Suddenly, he became quite contrite and apologetic, promising that if I would restore his access, he would immediately remove all the “files in question” and tell his friend to stop sending them to him. And that from now on, he would be very careful to adhere to the email policy…

Since it was Friday afternoon, and I really didn’t want to spend my weekend in the office dealing with this stuff, I told him that this was his one and only warning, and that if he ever showed up on my radar again, I would push for termination. I also told him that I was going to retain the archive of his email file as proof of the prior incident. True to his word, he removed all the porn files, and “stayed clean” for the rest of the time I was involved in the email system.

A few months later, he left the company, and I deleted the “archived file