I read your email. I’ve been doing it for over a decade. I’ve received a lot of press about it. Wired News covered me when I offered to read email for free to stop The Phantom Menace from being received or sent within an organization.

Richard Bliss in Wired

CNN labeled me the E-Grinch when they covered me on Headline News about reading email for my clients at Christmas time to keep their employees from sending or receiving email Christmas Cards.

One woman accused me of representing one of the most unprofessional organizations she had ever encountered. She was upset because I read her email.

Here is the story. The woman decided to use her company’s corporate email system to send an email to the corporation’s competitor. The competitor happened to be a client of mine and they had asked that I read their email for them on a regular basis.

The email from the woman came in to their organization. I read it and in this case it had a virus. It was the policy of my company if we ever encountered a virus while reading the emails, we would notify the sender out of common courtesy, since oftentimes people are unaware that they have a virus. And, as a added bonus, we would notify the owner of the domain name, just in case the sending employee was afraid to tell anyone they had a virus.

In this case, the woman’s boss was the company owner and the owner of the domain name. So, she received a notification that her email had been read and contained a virus, and we provided a copy of the email to her. Her boss also received the email and notification that the attachment contained a virus.

Unfortunately for the woman, the attachment she sent to the competition that contained a virus, was her resume. She was looking to jump ship to the other team.

And she thought I was unprofessional.

Watch this YouTube clip on the Today show recently talking about this very issue.

Big Brother in your Email

By the way, this policy really upset the IT directory for Hotmail. He personally contacted me and asked me to stop notifying him whenever one of his users sent out a virus. He didn’t care and didn’t want to know.

I’ve read a lot of email. There was the time one of my sales people contacted JC Penny’s chief legal counsel. We called them to let them know that several of their employees were sending out extremely sexually explicit content to my clients and they might want to do something about it.

Needless to say, they were extremely interested in talking to us.

I don’t just read email. I read your text messages as well. Awhile back, we did a test on reading text messages on BlackBerry devices. We were going to be offering this to our customers and wanted to make sure it worked. So, we pointed internally at our own users.

Oops! Seems someone was dating a couple of different people at the same time, right around Valentine’s Day, and was sending a little too much information. The messages were EXTREMELY personal and private, but were on the corporate system so they got read.

Oh, so you think you might just delete the messages and that way I can’t read them. Don’t even think about it.

I once had a law firm as a client. One of their users was deleted from the system, it was by accident, but nevertheless, the single most important person at the firm had their entire account deleted. (Just a note, the attorneys are not the most important people at law firms). Even with the account deleted and no backup, I was able to go into the system and recover the account and restore the email.

Life is short, Email is forever.

Why do I get to read email?

Visit my official blog to read the rest of this post at http://gwbliss.blogspot.com

Richard Bliss