• The New York Times, Thursday, January 11, 2007 11 AM

Employees are posing a security risk to large companies by forwarding their sensitive company email to Web-based personal email accounts offered by the likes of Google and Yahoo. Management, tipped off by the often-paranoid techie gatekeepers of their network, is rightly concerned that corporate secrets could slip through the cracks. Imagine a Google competitor or partner forwarding sensitive company information to their Gmail account?

This is a battle of best intentions: Employees do this for the sake of productivity, because in many cases, they can't access their corporate intranet once they leave the office.

In others, corporate networks require special software and multiple passwords for access; some companies even give their employees a card with a security code that changes every 60 seconds. To avoid the hassle, they forward their mail to other email applications, causing management more than a little anxiety. Use of other email applications potentially runs afoul of federal mandates that all company email be archived.

While there have been no major corporate disasters as a result of email forwarding, experts say the risks are real. So don't do it.

Read the whole story at The New York Times »