I'm the author.
1) Another poster has already responded to your Gmail comment; as he pointed out, I was forwarding mail, not deleting it, so the company still had all my mail.
2) Regarding the use of IM at the hospital: This would be a sensible explanation if the hospital also blocked all other unencrypted communication. They do not. Here is the senselessness of this policy: They allow people to use Gmail but disable the chat portion of Gmail; the only reason for this is to stop them from goofing off.