Well, my understanding of all this is that: 1) You were actually eavesdropping on e-mail conversations. 2) The people being eavesdropped on used their company-

Well, my understanding of all this is that: 1) You were actually eavesdropping on e-mail conversations. 2) The people being eavesdropped on used their company-provided e-mail accounts. 3) You found out lots of really personal stuff about the people. 4) Your "defense" here is that they shouldn't have been talking about personal stuff on their company-provided e-mail accounts. Correct? Now, assuming that I've got it right, let's go through these again: 1) This is bad, mmkay? 2) This is likely to happen at, you know, workplaces. 3) Again, people's personal matters are personal. 4) This is a bit more complicated: I'm sure you agree that by default, whenever you send an e-mail, you don't expect it to be read by anyone else besides the intended recipient(s). That's just the way people perceive e-mail - that they're sending "letters" to others. But basically now you're saying that because these people were sending e-mails from a company account, they should expect them to be read by people other than the recipients, and therefore should avoid talking about anything personal? It's true that some shitty companies do read their employees' e-mails, so this argument has some merit, but not all of them do. I wouldn't want to work at a company that I'd expect to be reading my e-mail all the time. At the workplace in question, do you think people had any reason to suspect their mails were being read by others? Were they the kind of people who would even be aware of the possibility? You said you were just trying to find out how fucked the company was, but did you really think there was nothing wrong with your approach? Besides, knowing someone screwed on the conference table after work hours is useful knowledge when you sometimes eat lunch in the conference room. Cute, but I'm sure the table is cleaned daily.