Our e-mail is run through our own domain. I’m the admin, so I know Mr. S’s password. He doesn’t care; he rarely uses e-mail anyway. When he writes e-mail to a mutual friend, he lets me read it before he sends it. I do the same, if I think he’ll care. But I’m on the computer a lot more than he is. In fact, for long and boring reasons he doesn’t actually have a computer to use right now, and he doesn’t really care. I check his e-mail for him every few days to see if anything came in. If he’s lucky, he might get one a week. Our friends know that if they want e-mail to us read promptly, they should send it to me.
I’m sure he doesn’t remember my passwords, but I have them written down and hidden where he knows where to find them if I get hit by a bus.
We have separate email accounts and both have the same password, but only to keep our son from getting on there and messing around. If his is up and I happen to see an email that might interest me (from his mom or something), I’ll read it. Likewise, he does the same if mine’s up. I wouldn’t log on to go read his stuff, though. It’s generally pretty boring. I couldn’t care less if he reads my emails; there’s nothing in there that I probably haven’t told him already. The only thing I don’t want him to see is the various invoices I have coming for his birthday present. I just set it to funnel all emails that have “order” in the subject line into another folder and I’m golden.
We share the computers at the Butler household, and though she can certainly unlock the PC (screensaver to thwart activities of the 2yo’s random button pushing) and open Outlook, I don’ t think she does very often. I don’t care if she does anyway, and more than once, I’ve asked her to do it specifically to find something.
I know her account passwords (online email), and have done the same to get a piece of information that I know is in her email.
I don’t mind if she looks, she doesn’t mind if I look. I’ve nothing (in email) to hide anyway, and if I did, I’d have an online email account with a ‘non-standard’ password anyway. (I don’t)
Not that it matters in this case, but never write when you can speak, never speak when you can nod, never nod when you can wink, etc…
We try to keep those things separate. His email and passwords are his business, and mine are my business. We even have separate profiles set up on the laptop at home, mostly so each of us could customize how we want Windows to look when we log in and what programs pop up automatically.
We’re not privacy freaks, mind you. He could just pick up my Blackberry if he felt the need to look at my message history, and we don’t logout of the laptop the second we step away in case the other person might come by and look at something.
It’s just that expecting full access to each other’s emails falls under the “too close” header, along with peeing with the door open and going everywhere together. I like my relationships with a little bit of mystery, thanks.
My wife and I could snoop in each other’s e-mail and stuff, but we don’t… as far as I know. I have more desire for privacy than she does.
Our home PC is primarily “my” computer. We have separate accounts (both of them administrators) on it, with no system passwords. Her e-mail isn’t stored there.
She also has a laptop, provided by her job. I know her system password, and she sometimes asks me to check her e-mails.
We both use the same password on most sites.
I consider our computer use (and bags, and bathroom time) private. She doesn’t, but tries not to intrude on mine out of respect.
She recently asked what my user name was here at SDMB, because I talk about it all the time. I hope that she doesn’t find it worth the money to get an account and gain the ability to search for my posts.
I am my fiancée’s network administrator - so I could root through her work e-mail to my heart’s content, if I wanted to. Not really very tempting.
At home, we both have separate computers and run GoogleTalk at startup, so we could both snoop in each other’s gmail accounts, if we wanted to. Just a right-click away.
I have a strict policy of never writing anything in an e-mail that I wouldn’t feel comfortable with her reading.
I have friends that have single spousal e-mail accounts. I don’t get it. Two would be extravagant?
Mr. Kat and I know each other’s passwords, but we only check each other’s email upon request - “Yahoo’s acting up. Can you try to get in and see if B. emailed me what time the party starts…”
My homepage is my iGoogle page, so he can see my emails if he wanted to. He also knows my yahoo account info. I used to know his password, but he just informed me that he changed it recently because he was bored. We generally only go into each other’s stuff when one person isn’t near a computer and needs some piece of information.
Obviously we have separate work email accounts because we work in 2 different places, but at home we use one account; TheLastnames at provider.net.
I do have an old Yahoo account that I don’t really use anymore, but keep because it’s the account I used to sign up for various places, not all of which I can remember to go change it. And I can’t read half of his email anyway, since it’s in that weird potato language he speaks ;). But yeah, we share one inbox – nothing to hide and too lazy to log out and log in under a different user. <shrug>
I would never want to read my wife’s emails and I woulnd’t want her to read mine. I find it strange when married couples have no private space. What if my wife wants to write an email bitching about me? It’s the kind of harmless griping every married person does, but if I knew about it, it would hurt my feelings and damage the marriage.
For people who read each others’ emails, do you also listen in on each others’ phone calls?
Heck, I’ve asked my husband to check my email for me before. We really don’t have any secrecy issues on that; I don’t write anything I wouldn’t be happy for him to read, and vice versa. That said, we generally don’t read each other’s email unless we’re invited to. It’s not so much a privacy issue as that we trust the other one to keep us informed if there’s anything of importance we need to know.
As for the phone call thing, madmonk28, we certainly don’t go to any effort NOT to listen in, generally speaking. If we need to take a personal call we stop, advise the other one that we’re going to need to take the call privately, and go to a quiet room in the house. Otherwise, if the call’s out in the open, then uh, yeah, we’re generally aware at least peripherally of the general conversation. Should we be wearing earplugs, perhaps?
We only have one computer at home, with separate accounts (primarily to keep iTunes from confusing our music and iPods). Neither of our personal accounts are password-protected, so there’s really nothing stopping my wife from logging in as me and opening Outlook. To my knowledge, she never has.
She doesn’t check her email terribly regularly, so she has specifically asked me to log in to her Hotmail account every so often and let her know if there’s anything that looks important. So, yeah, I give a cursory glance to pretty much every email she gets.
No, we don’t read each other’s email. I gave him my passwords for a couple things when I needed him to find something fast and I wasn’t there, but nothing particularly private. It doesn’t matter much to me because I don’t talk about him to other people or say stuff that would piss him off without having spoken to him first, really. I can’t verify but he says pretty much the same about me, he keeps stuff about our relationship to himself.
I never write emails bitching about my husband. I never speak to people bitching about my husband. I have WAY too much respect for him and my marriage to ever speak ill of him under any circumstances.
Actually, yes, believe it or not. We have an 800 square foot house with an open floor plan. With the exception of the bathroom, there isn’t anywhere in it that a conversation cannot be fully heard. And in fact, we conduct many conversations on the speaker phone specifically so we can both talk and/or listen, to both mutual friends and family.
I just don’t have anything to say (for myself) that I can’t say in front of my husband. OBVIOUSLY this doesn’t hold true if the person I’m talking to would prefer to keep their end of the conversation private. And I do not share things other people tell me with him, if they’ve asked me to keep it confidential. But I also tend not to have friends who are in the habit of bitching about their spouses, either. Nor am I big on the whole “email as chat” thing, either, so the likelihood that anything like that would show up in my inbox from a friend is severely approaching nil anyway. Ask anyone who knows me; I suck at keeping up email correspondence.
We don’t share, but my homepage has my mail preview and I have my home machine always set to remember the passwords to my gmail and yahoo accounts. If Z.R. Test happens to be at my machine he might even click on something interesting as long as it’s not personal (e.g. a Dope thread, or my ThinkGeek newsletter). He’d never look at an email from a person though. At some point I’m sure he asked if it was ok if he did that, and I don’t mind.
I never look at his email though. I suppose I could, but I don’t feel comfortable doing anything at his machine, especially when mine’s always available and organized the way I like it.
Our e-mail situation has evolved over time. When we first got a computer, we couldn’t fathom that e-mail would come to our house that wouldn’t be for both of us. Over time we began to find more and more uses for e-mail and we got separate web-based accounts. Then we got Razorette a laptop with wireless internet, then we got matching laptops with wi-fi or whatever it is – mine even has a Verizon attachment that gives me slightly-better-than-dialup internet all over the Rocky Mountain West. We each use our Outlook for scheduling, record-keeping, journaling, etc. Now separate e-mail accounts are necessary, like separate cell phones.
I used to be very protective about this kind of stuff, but with the current SO, I don’t care. We have our own separate emails, but sometimes I’m on the road and I need access to my email, so I have to call her and have her dig out my mails. So she knows my passwords, I know hers, and it doesn’t bug me in the least.