legal question

[BigWill]

who "owns" emails sent/received by an employee after termination?

Is the employee required to return all correspondence that he sent/received to the employer?

Hypothetical: If somebody worked for a bunch of crooks and kept copies of emails that were sent by him or recieved by him, is that illegal?

 

[HornBud]

It is definitely the company's email. Requiring a terminated to return email to the company is a confusing question to me tho. All email sent through the company server is stored somewhere within the company. Now, maybe the employee used their own machine to send/receive, and requiring the employee to open their own private machine up to IT to offload those copies might present an issue. Even if someone did submit to that, there's probably a very good chance that they have already backed those up.

 

[BigWill]

yeah...that's the issue. My "friend" has the normal backups of everything on his laptop, which was stripped by the IT dept.

Now he gets a nastygram from some lawyer demanding the return of "all company property". The company is a little bitter that my "friend" is helping some of the folks that the company screwed over with their lawsuits.

 

[NCAAFBALLROX]

Interesting sidebar here; what if:

Co. sends Email to & receives Email FROM the employee; employee has been inserting BCC: to his or her Yahoo / Gmail / Hotmail account & now has a running transcript of the discussions.

Who has ownership & how would the co. be able to determine this information has grown legs & wandered to other eyes?