Long story short: I sent an email to one of my coworkers tonight warning her about how some of the other employees were out for blood and wanting to see her sacked…with a rider that she should NOT approach me at work tomorrow for details, but keep it to email for security’s sake etc.
She was panicking because her husband reads all of her emails and has access to all of her personal information!! AND would be pissed-off by all that I/she said!
Which got me wondering: whilst I have nothing to hide (I think!) in my inbox or my jauntings around the internet, I would think it a gross intrusion of privacy for my SO to read my stuff. What I write in emails is between me and the recipient, not a third party. I don’t want to read his personal stuff either…so my password is sacrosanct, as is his.
It’s all very well to ‘share’ some information that you recieve via email voluntarily, but would you want to do it by default?
No. Maybe it’s the postal worker in me: apart from going on occasional machine gun rampages, I am under oath regarding “the sanctity of the mails” and I treat email the same.
No way. Not ever. My email is mine, and if I had an SO who was offended by that, it might actually be a deal breaker.
Although I guess I understand that some people need their privacy, hubbie and I share all our e-mail. I have my own address that he doesn’t usually look at, but he is welcome to see it if he wants.
I’ve always been mystified by marriages where people can’t share just about everything, although I know it is pretty common. There are very few things I’ve deliberately kept from my husband; one was that a friend of ours told me that he met his wife when she approached him, while married to another man, for wanton, no-strings-attached sex. Well, they hit it off so well that she ended up divorcing her husband and marrying the “fling.”
Since my husband is pretty conservative about these things, I didn’t tell him that because I didn’t want that information to ruin his friendship with the couple in question.
That’s rare, though. And the funny thing is, he eventually found out through his own sources, and managed not to be too judgmental about it, and to continue the friendship.
I should just tell my spouse EVERYTHING and not worry about it.
It’s not that I have anything in there to hide, but some things are personal - perhaps conversations that I’ve had with friends about my SO, or things friends have told me and asked me to keep confidential, which is something I would respect. If there is amusing or interesting mail, I’ll call her over and invite her to read it, or read it out to her, but she would never assume that she could read it without asking me, and I would never expect access to her account either.
Absolutely agreed. Not on practical grounds, just purely on ethical/philosophical ones…
It’s not about not sharing, or keeping secrets. Shit, 99% of the stuff I get via email/messageboards I share with my SO, and he either groans in mock disgust or laughs at the silliness of it all.
It’s just that some stuff is just you and NOT the property of your SO.
My husband and I share a computer and kind of share a couple of e-mail addresses. He has one he primarily uses and I have one I primarily use, but we both know the passwords to each account. If I am on the computer he might ask me to check his account to see “if David sent me that schedule he promised” or whatever. I might do the same if he is online. Other than that, I don’t generally check his account and he doesn’t check mine. It’s more good manners than anything else. We’re the same way with regular mail and wallets, like LSL Guy said, except I open all bills and business-type mail, no matter who it is addressed to.
My last breakup was because I made out with another guy and my boyfriend, feeling suspicious, broke into my email account and read about it. I write down just about everything and he knew it. He also knew variations of my password, to the point that it only took a few tries to get into my email.
Looking back, it was obviously past time for us to break up (otherwise I wouldn’t have been making out with another guy!) so in a way I’m glad that it happened the way it did…otherwise we may have dragged on for another year or so before the inevitable happened.
But that doesn’t change the fact that my emails to my friends are basically my journal, and as such they are quite private. If I want to write a girlfriend all about some stupid argument I had with my current SO, to blow off steam and get her perspective, that’s not for him to read. The same way he’s not entitled to hear every conversation I have with friends, or every thought that crosses my mind.
I respect his privacy equally. (Although men aren’t known for their dishing abilities so I would be very surprised if his emails contained anything remotely interesting.)
So I have no idea what his passwords are and I would never ask, nor would he.
With my last girlfriend, I knew her password since the mail server was mine, I set up the account and the password, and she never bothered to change it. I looked at it once after we broke up (not proud of this and did come clean about it, so please hold your scathing) and felt like a fucking spy. It’s just… private, you know?
Since I set up my wife’s email (she is as non-technical as they come), I by default know her password. I only look at it if she asks me to however - if I’m online and she wants to know if a certain email has come in, she’ll have me log in and look for it, rather than waiting until I’m done/kick me off. She’s never cared that I see all her other email at the same time.
Since regular mail came up - I open anything addressed to her if it’s printed, since it’s almost certainly either junk mail or a bill, and I handle the bills. Handwritten envelopes I leave alone.
My wife and I each have our own computers. I wouldn’t read her mail, not only from an ethical standpoint, but also out of respect for her privacy. I don’t know any of her passwords. If I’d like to buy something from amazon.com, I go to her, she logs in with her password. I’ve never asked what it was.
The only e-mail accounts I have are at work and Yahoo Mail. I don’t even have an e-mail client installed on my home computer. I don’t get any e-mail. I check my ISP’s mail account every few months, and there are no more messages there than there were the last time I checked. No spam, either, because there are only six people or businesses allowed to access it in the first place; everyone else is blocked.
No SO. But my inclination would be to say that my SO if I had one would or could have access to my passwords (especially given that I’m lazy about changing them) but would not have my permission to read all my e-mails. Read a specific e-mail with reason? No problem. Routinely read all my e-mails just because? No way. I’d like some privacy here, please.
Why yes, I would. Dearly Beloved and I have one email account which we share. Actually we also share it with our 8 year old.
I have a work related one and so does Dearly Beloved but they consist of, well, work. The 8 year old also has one of his own, which he uses for Lego club related activities and so on – too much spam for me.
We just don’t open each other’s mail. Just like the snail mail box (we also only have one of those). It’s pretty easy, really.
However, we haven’t got as exciting a life as you have so probably that’s the difference.
I can’t imagine sharing an email account. Heck, I can’t imagine sharing a computer. I know that the non-computer people see it as simply an appliance, but to me, my computer is as personal as my underwear. I always hate it when I have house guests and they want to check their email or something. My computer is MINE.
Also, why would you share an email account, when there are tons of email providers (hotmail, gmail, etc) where you can get free ones?
Jeez! This is a big pet peeve of mine. My Mom and Dad do this. It drives me insane because sometimes there’s stuff I want to tell my Dad but not my Mom as she tends to be either a “finger wager” or a “worry wart”.
My partner and I have separate emails but I know her password and she, mine but neither of us would open each others mail without permission. We have nothing to hide but we also respect each other’s privacy. It may sound contradictory but it makes sense to us.
Also, we have the same values so there’s nothing in either of our emails that would get the other’s dander up.
Our computers are next to each other, and either of us could read email at any time, since they’re always logged in. We just don’t, unless the other asks us to. But I wouldn’t care if he did look through my email because he needed something; he’s my husband and I’ve got nothing private from him (unless someone else tells me something private, which isn’t very often). It would be weird if he checked all my email, though. What would he be looking for and why would he feel the need?
My husband knows most of my passwords, and I can never remember his (his are more important, and thus more complex, while my passwords are all to things like yahoogroups and fairly simple). When I need one of his for business or something, he either types it for me or dictates it.
I knew my ex-husband’s passwords because every now and then he would call me and ask me to open an email and give him a piece of information that it contained, like a phone number or something. I never looked at his email otherwise, and I never read anything other than the specific mail that I was asked to open. I don’t know if he knew my password, but I certainly wouldn’t have hesitated to give it to him if I had a reason to.
That doesn’t sound contradictory at all. That just sounds normal.
As for the OP’s friend–that’s just messed up that her husband reads all her emails. Sounds like something you’d find on one of those “controlling and abusive behavior” checklists.
We share the ones at home. I set up a separate account to use when I was doing a job search, but my husband knows the password. Neither of us would be dumb enough to email anything we didn’t want the other to see, anyway. We don’t share work accounts for security reasons.
