Monitoring Company E mail

I am amazed at how many foreigners E mail from their work sites. That is, using company E mail sources and company time for personal reasons. It is very rare here in the U.S. because to so so is often grounds for being fired. The reason is not so much that companies are worried about the employees wasting time at work, but rather about their "trade secrets" leaking out in those kinds of E mailings.
To stop this, more than 1/3 of companies with 1000 or more employees have special workers who do nothing but monitor the E mail of employees, and more and more are doing this. Another third of the companies in the U.S. have software installed on company computers to scan for any E mail that contains corporate secrets or content deemed "offensive".
It is legal for U.S companies to monitor employee, Instant Messaging, E mail and Internet use on corporate equipment and networks. But that seems not to be the case in most other countries, or perhaps, the companies just don't use that practice.
With the increase in monitoring more firms are establishing policies for electronic communication in the workplace, and almost all businesses here have policies governing E mail and Internet use. Some now are posting rules about "blogging" on company time.
On the surface it appears that the companies here are "spying" on their employees. But I think it wise to stop the practice of using company E mail to communicate informally with friends while at work. E-mail today is the electronic equivalent of DNA evidence.
It never dies! If a person E mails another he or she can expect the possibility of the content to resurface some other time. So many anti trust cases and other corporate law suits utilize E mail in evidence presented to courts.