I am wondering if I have a confidentiality problem with our IT manager but I don't want to jump to a rash conclusion.A friend sent me an email which I recieved just fine. An hour later, he forwarded a second message - a notice he received that this same message could not be delivered to an email at a different domain - one which happens to be owned by our IT manager (the email address was his initials at a domain he owns). I was very surprised but also had been sensitized, as another person in the company had previously insisted the IT manager was reading her email.Is there any plausible reason that my personal email would ever be routed to a different email/domain outside of our company?Could he have some legitamite excuse for doing this?Is the bounce message sufficient justification for me to confront the employee? Or even terminate?THanks for perspective,G

It is possible that your IT manager is forwarding all mail for everyone to another system. Or he may just be forwarding YOUR mail. A lot of companies require employees to sign an agreement basically saying that "if someone deems it necessary" your work e-mail and voice mail can be reviewed. The "deems it necessary" part can get fuzzy. However, my definition of "someone" would be the HR department, legal, or very senior (not IT) management. You need someone with Domain Admins rights that can logon to your Exchange servers and review the configuration and see if e-mail is being forwarded to an outside source. You have some pretty good evidence, but don't give your IT Manager an opportunity to clean this up before you can take a look. You might consider contracting with an outside, trusted source to do the review of your system and see if the IT Manager really is doing this. I say this all too frequently, but your IT personnel have to be some of the most trusted people within your organization. You have to be able to place the same degree of trust in your IT folks that you place in HR, accounting, and legal.