E-mail message privacy concerns

on as you or with an account that has the same permissions to your mail as you do. But someone other than you could grant the necessary permissions. For Exchange 2000 and 2003, an Exchange administrator could create an administrative account that has permissions to all mailboxes on an Exchange server (see KB268754 and KB262054 at http://support.microsoft.com). Once logged on as that account, they could access all mailboxes in the organization from their own machine. If your mailbox resides on an Exchange 5.5 server, then there is an account by default that has rights to every mailbox and that account is called the Exchange Service Account.

What it boils down to is the privacy policy in your company. Many corporations, government agencies, internet service providers and educational institutes have very different views and policies on the privacy of e-mail. These policies should dictate what administrators can and cannot do when they are administering your machine. In my own experience as an Exchange administrator, even when there is not a formal policy, I have always asked for consent from legal services prior to responding to any request to gather or view mail for a particular user. I hope that your administrators would be as scrupulous.