Personal E-mail @ Work
This topic has come up a bit lately, with some clarifications of delineations between what is expected out of employees with regards to their job and “the Internet”. This should obviously not be construed as policy by any means (see the bottom of every blog page for the disclaimer).
A lot of people- especially those of us who’ve been here forever- use our @potsdam.edu accounts exclusively/near exclusively. We have no policy that explicitly states you can’t use it for personal purposes.
My general guidance is based on volume: Is most of your e-mail work-related or personal? If it’s clearly mostly work, then I certainly don’t foresee someone having a legitimate problem with it. If you get 20 emails-an-hour for non-work stuff, and only a few for work, then maybe it’s time to punt to a different mail service for the personal stuff. This may be especially true if you enjoy online shopping, and get prolific amounts of “sale flyers” and “deal” e-mails. That could be looked at as “more bad” than the occasional e-mails from friends and relatives with links to pictures of their “cute” kids.
My $0.02.
