E-mail Monitor?

Courtesy of Fark.....
http://www.news-leader.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050619/BUSINESS/506190350/1003/BUSINESS

I had no idea people might actually be appointing staff purely for this role! I know HR/IT depts monitor, but wow, this shocked me.

I get the impression it's more lax in the U.S, I know of lots of people who e-mail from work (and not anything that can't wait, silly and inappropriate "forwards" mostly) and a lot of bloggers who do it, but I don't know many people that can do it in the UK (some of you UKY's are able to post from work I know) but that would be an abuse of policy in my department - unless it was your lunchtime- there is a loose policy that you can surf/e-mail appropriate sites in your own lunch break - however, I have not seen it in writing and I don't trust departments that only verbally agree these things.

Does anyone here have to monitor anything?

Do you e-mail/surf a lot at work?

Just curious.

I actually haven't got external email. Can't send or recieve emails from outside the company. It's cool, I have no need for it. And I have to watch what sites I go on. I know my company does have the policy that they monitor but, being on the same floor as the IT dept, I also know they haven't got time to monitor my activities. I still keep my internet use to a minimum, like UKY or news sites. One guy in another one of our offices got fired for downloading porn onto his work computer. What a numpty.

We have to sign something before we get internet access that says we won't download anything or visit webmail sites and the like.

I work for 'the 5th largest bank in the world'  .
We dont have internet access, so definitely no surfing allowed.
We do have external email, but it is monitored by a special team within the IT department, and they most definitely report back to the management, because i have heard of a lot of people being sacked for abuse of email.

Yeah it was monitored at my work by someone in the IT department.  I got my wrist slapped once for accidentally leaving Hotmail open for a couple of hours and one guy got into trouble for listening to the radio over the internet all day.  We also had to sign a thing saying we would only use the internet "in moderation" but although I asked several times, no-one ever defined that.