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Employee use of electronic mail (e-mail) during business hours is a common characteristic of the 21st century American workplace. According to a recent study, over 130 million workers are currently flooding recipients with 2.8 billion e- mail messages each day. (1) Employers provide e-mail services to their employees as an efficient means of facilitating both intra-company communication and communication with the outside client base. E-mail serves to increase the efficiency of today’s workplace because it is inexpensive to provide, simple to install and easy to use. E-mail usage also dramatically decreases the use of office-related, paper-based correspondence. However, despite these efficiencies, this technological advancement is also creating collateral problems concerning issues of employee privacy that today’s legal environment appears unprepared to solve. This inadequacy in the law is primarily based on the fact that many employees do not know the extent of their privacy rights regarding their company-provided e-mail accounts. In fact, many employees operate under the false assumption that personal e-mail messages sent from work are protected f