Ok, sorry - that last sentence seems snarky and I don’t mean it to be. But I do mean the advice… talk to your spouses or SOs when you think things are going wrong. Sneaking behind their backs to find things out just makes whatever issues you may find that much more difficult to deal with, since the person whose things were searched will be that much more upset.
This isn’t a relationship advice thread. I’ll just leave it at that 
My SO and I have completely separate and private accounts, and I have a long and (eventually) hilarious account about why we need them, which I will spare everybody.
Basically, I am the sort of person who has been known to go absolutely batshit when someone in my family asks me what book I’m reading. (I have a book cover that makes paperbacks seem like hardbacks, which I put on whatever I’m reading as it keeps them from falling apart as I lug them around). So if my SO was snooping in my email I would be very unhappy, and as for snooping in his, I couldn’t care less.
[QUOTE=Hokkaido Brit]
Do what we do - marry a foreigner and make sure that both of you are virtually illiterate in each other’s language!
My husband can read English, and I can read Japanese really, but for both of us it’s at the level of bloody hard work, so most times we can’t be bothered!
QUOTE]
Yet this is exactly what MY SO did. He can’t read English, so he actually wrote down the entire contents of an email and took it to his friend to read. If he’d have asked I’d have gladly read it to him, but I guess he just didn’t trust me enough. It broke my heart because I thought he did trust me, dammit! I was shocked to think he’d go through all this trouble–I thought I knew him better. So now there’s a little less trust on my part, but we’re working through it.
I’m pretty much in Hilarity N. Suze’s camp, here. Even in cases where I have pretty much ready access if I want it, I can’t imagine why I would want to go rummaging in someone else’s mail. (I was kind of weirded out when my ex-boyfriend called me up and asked me to look something up in one of his shell accounts, for that matter, and that was by his specific request.) It’s just a basic personal boundaries thing for me, and I’d have serious problems being in an intimate relationship with someone who didn’t see it the same way.
If I’m snuggled up with someone and they’re typing, I don’t look at the screen. I consider that basic politeness. Also, having people reading what I’m writing while I’m doing it creeps me out, so I’m not gonna do it to other people. (I think I perplexed my boyfriend slightly when he said something like, “But you’ve already seen that” regarding an email he wrote while I was leaning on him – I pointed out that I didn’t read it.)
I had a relationship with a guy a while back who thought nothing of abusing his sysadmin powers to read his friends’ mail; my feeling now, looking at it in retrospect, was that I should have taken this as the warning sign it was and gotten out.
My wife and I use a common email account and many of the letters that come to me are for both of us, so I don’t really consider her reading my mail to be ‘snooping’.
If you’ll note, I didn’t ask for sympathy. I also stated that “I ended an eight year relationship.” Key word here is “I.”
The problem is, of course, not that I got “caught.” The problem is that I did it in the first place. I don’t blame him for hunting for proof, because the proof was there.
The last two years of our relationship were basically a trainwreck. I would never have done what I did otherwise. Not that I’m justifying it; there’s really no justification for what I did. I am well aware of that, and dealing with it as we speak.
My point was that the OP’s question is a question of the stability of the relationship.
Mine didn’t have any anymore.
Proof’s in the pudding.
Pepper Mill and I open each other’s mailboxes to download the mail and, as a courtesy, we delete the obvious Spam from each others’ box. But we don’t open anything obviously not spam.
Mrs. Fresh and I have one account for the both of us where most of our mail winds up, but we each have our own private emails, and we wouldn’t read each other’s email any sooner than we would read each other’s diary. It’s a question of privacy and trust, I suppose. We’re both pretty private people, and we both trust each other not to do anything stupid.
As far as snooping in the email of a hypothetical SO, I wouldn’t do that, because that would be a violation of trust and privacy. If I thought there was something going on, I wouldn’t go snooping for proof; I’d just break up with her. In the end, what matters isn’t what she does or doesn’t do. It’s what I can trust her to do or not do, and if I don’t feel as if I can trust her for whatever reason, then there’s no point in continuing the relationship. It sounds harsh, but this outlook has saved me from a lot of relationship-based insanity, and it’s helped me find someone whom I can really love and trust.
This type of thing led to my brother and sister-in-law eventually getting divorced… She accidentally read his e-mail (he left it open and she used the computer and saw the e-mails in question). The e-mails clued her in that he was lying about stuff, and when she confronted him, he lied again. That was the beginning of the end. I think she was totally justified, because a husband and wife should have nothing to hide from each other.
For me, I leave my e-mail open all the time on our shared computer, because first of all I am sure that my boyfriend would never read it, and second, because I have nothing to hide. So part of me would not mind if he read it; but then again, part of me would feel a litte violated, because it would make me feel like he didn’t trust me. So I’m not really sure how I would feel…
I have mixed feelings about this. I’m sort of a private person by nature, and I like to know that my e-mail account, Amazon order history, etc. are totally secure. It’s not that I have anything interesting to hide; it just skeeves me out to think about someone essentially reading over my shoulder. My wife has most of my passwords because at one time or another it was convenient or necessary for her to check something when I didn’t have access. That’s no big deal, but it would upset me if I found out she was actually opening up and reading my e-mail just for the heck of it.
I don’t see the sexist angle at all. Everyone I know at work has either discovered something by snooping or reports being caught by someone snooping on them. Sometimes sheepish about it (I guess leaving my diary out was Freudian) or incensed (how dare he check up on where I ran up the credit card bill).
And of course snooping on teens is mandatory when they start sneaking around and their friends have lots of dope jokes.
My mailbox is wide open for my wife to read, as is everything else on my computer. Frankly, I think the concept of a private mailbox you keep from your spouse to be just a little weird. I wonder what pre-computer people would have thought about that. Can you imaging people setting up private post office boxes so they could have private communications their spouse isn’t allowed to look at? Sounds strange to me.
If I use my mail for something I don’t want my wife to see (like ordering a birthday present for her), I’ll just say “Don’t look at my E-mail for a few days. I’m expecting something that’s a surprise”.
I don’t know whether she looks at my mail or not anyway. And I don’t care. I don’t consider an inbox to be my private domain from her. It’s just another household tool.
The internet can be dangerous to a relationship, because it makes it very easy for people to form friendships and social relationships outside of the marriage. Nothing wrong with that, until it gets out of hand. One way to keep it from getting out of hand is to apply the rule of thumb, “Would my spouse object to this conversation if he/she could see it?” And one way to enforce that you live by that rule is to not set up a super-secret communication channel in the first place.
I think a better analogy would be letters that are addressed to one spouse or the other. It doesn’t strike me as strange or overly secretive to expect each spouse to open the letters addressed to them. In fact, I think it would be weird for one spouse to insist on being the first to see each letter even if it’s addressed to the other.
I think it’s weird to give a shit if they do. We open mail addressed to each other all the time, usually because it just doesn’t matter. We’ve been together for 16 years and have two childern. If we can’t trust each other by now then what’s the point?
We don’t even have separate e-mail accounts or passwords for anything. There’s no reason to. If you’ve got nothing to hide, you’ve got nothing to worry about.
It’s not a question of having anything to hide. Even very loving partners in a relationship need their space and privacy. I didn’t give up my individuality when I said “I do,” nor did my vows include telling my wife everything there was to know about me.
I can talk about anything and everything with Mrs. Fresh, but that doesn’t mean I want to. I keep a diary, and she writes fan-fic under a pseudonym, and we don’t snoop on each other’s turf. Moreover, regardless of whether or not there’s anything in there that would kill the relationship, I’d be super pissed if she read it. It’s all about respecting each other’s borders and privacy. You need a space of your own in marriage. I do, anyway.
The difference is that both spouses see the letter, know that you received a letter, and probably know who it’s from. Do you think people would tolerate a spouse receiving letters from an unknown source, and then hiding them and refusing to let the other read them because they were ‘private’?
Of course, if a letter from Grandma arrives and you tell your spouse it contains private stuff about your birthday or something, no big deal. But how do you think a spouse would feel if you opened a private mailbox so that you could keep correspondence *totally private?
I see a pretty big difference between maintaining a private diary, and maintaining a private relationship.
Not just the basics of privacy, even; there’s the whole “I’m damn well not interested in this shit” problem. I’m on, for example, a couple of mailing lists for religious discussion and a really busy one for the Boston Red Sox. My husband is not religious and his level of interest in baseball is mostly that he roots for my team because it makes me easier to live with (only half a joke). These go to my email, because why should he have to waste his more limited (at least with regards to the internet) time sorting through my stuff?
I mean, setting aside the fact that I’ve had the same email address for about ten years now, which is longer than we’ve been living in the same state, and my other emails have been given to me by friends who have admin on various boxes – thus, the idea of setting up some sort of joint account would be a disruption to a perfectly functional status quo with no advantages that I can perceive.
The “you don’t have anything to hide, what are you worried about?” argument doesn’t work for me here any more than it does in threads more appropriate to GD.
When did I say otherwise? I was talking about the right to have privacy in a relationship. That doesn’t mean I have the right to carry on a private relationship behind my SO’s back.
But that’s just the point. We’re talking about e-mails which REQUIRE a third party to be involved. Diaries or private fiction do not. There’s a difference between maintaining a space for private thoughts and actually concealing a correspondence with another person. If one or both people in a relationship is hiding or obscuring communications with another person, there is a problem there.