[supercanuck]

I work from home sometimes, and its a baseline assumption that my emails are being read by my employer. Therefore, his email serves two purposes, 1. it communicates to any line manager that he is in fact working, and 2. Letting his Coworkers know that he's expecting them to work odd hours like himself.

[fps]

1) I've worked IT or IT/operations at a handful of small to large companies over the past 15 years where I've been directly in control of email and any "snooping" requests needed to go through me. I can count on one hand the number of times a manager has asked to read their employee's email. It's either been due to some HR related issue (harassment, misuse of resources, etc.) or because the employee was unreachable and some critical info had been sitting in their inbox. Employers snooping on email in a business environment is super rare.

2) My experience managing and being managed has led me to believe that most managers want their employees to work less, and most people believe that their manager wants them to work crazy hours. Frequently these people are the same people. eg. a middle manager wants his employees to go home and not work after hours, but they assume that their manager expects them to work from home between 7 and 11 PM every night. the GP of your comment even said this - he tells his employees to not work odd hours, but he does so anyway.