Email Is Never Private

An email list dedicated to technical support should be archived, and the archives should be available on a Web site, and easily searchable, so subscribers can look at old questions and answers instead of wasting other list members' time asking about something that might have been covered a few days or weeks ago. An email list where ideas are exchanged among a group of professionals probably should not be archived. But the lack of archives does not mean that email messages sent to a group are truly private, since most companies log and save all email that runs through their corporate servers, and courts, at least in the U.S., can subpoena those messages, and members of an email list can certainly store messages on their own computers. In the end, privacy on an email list, and even in private email, is an illusion unless that email is encrypted and the encryption keys are tightly held by a small group of people who are all sworn to death if they are captured by "the opposition," whoever that may be.

The terms of service for any email list or group you start or run should make the inherent lack of privacy in all email very clear to subscribers.

But most of all, you need to remember, yourself, that your own email is not very private, whether you send it to an email list with 5000 members or to a single co-worker.