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Comment by crescentfresh | Hacker News Reader

On a semi-side topic: Canadian dev here, I always immediately hard delete e-mail correspondence (both inbox and sent) with HR on anything that I feel private about, as I don't want the guys in IT reading it. I know they don't, but I also know they can.

For example, I might trust the head of IT but I might not trust that new intern or "new guy" they just hired.

What do you guys do when it comes to HR correspondence at your places of work?

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Well, there's nothing I can really do about it. When I hit "delete", my company email doesn't actually get deleted. It just disappears from my view. I believe the stated policy is they delete after 3 years post "delete".

If I worked in or near the office, I'd walk over to HR and request printouts instead of emails, but since I work remotely, I'm stuck.

companies that care about that have email gateways that will store all messages, regardless of you saving/deleting them. this is not something they do at individuals inbox, to prevent what you do with the HR emails.

With most corporate email systems, I'm pretty sure you can't hard delete any message. Sure, it may no longer show up in your inbox but it won't be vanishing off of the compliance logs.

What do you mean "hard delete"? If your place of work is using any of the big cloud email services, they should be able to get at those emails regardless of whether you've deleted them.

This does not necessarily prevent them from being able to read these emails. If the email system has journaling enabled then a copy of every email sent and received is retained.

Are you certain that IT can't read deleted emails? I would think there would be backups and logs in the email server.

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