For me even the weirder part that the CEO knows the author's email program has an interval of 10mins. This CEO checked what kind of traffic is being used. Hopefully he wasn't interested in un-encyrypted traffic data as well!
Encryption was seldom used there for POP3/IMAP/SMTP because hey you're on the same ISP network and not crossing the Internet. Further it was pretty easy to hop on a terminal server like a Portmaster and do a debug/packet dump of individual dialup connections if somebody really wanted to see what somebody was doing.