There are plenty of email disputes that end in staff being "flamed" by their employer:
In one case, related by a lawyer, a female employee accessed a male colleague's PC to answer emails while he was on holiday. She did it to make sure they were all up to date and replies had gone out. But she came across one that was unflattering about her and complained. In response, the company sacked her for unauthorised access to an employee's emails.
Policeman Dave Eggleton was also on the wrong end of a defamatory email, but with a different end result. He discovered meat bought from Asda was rotten after he started cooking a Sunday dinner for his family. He bought a Chinese takeaway instead.
The following day he took the joint back and demanded a refund plus the £18 cost of the takeaway. Staff at the store in Derbyshire paid up after he threatened to show the meat to environmental health officers.
Later, however, other Asda stores were emailed details of his complaint, a personal description and his car registration under the heading: 'Refund fraud - urgent, urgent, urgent'. PC Eggleton found out about the message through a contact and issued a writ for libel in the High Court. He reached an out-of-court settlement, believed to be more than £10,000.
In the US, oil giant Chevron was successfully sued for $2.2m when lawyers hunting for evidence in a sexual harassment case found an email containing a joke about a beer being better than a woman. It revealed a laddish culture that supported the harassment case.
In the summer, 15 traders and staff at the City bank Merrill Lynch were asked to leave within hours after they were allegedly caught circulating offensive and racist material on the internal e-mail system.
The eight men and seven women were ordered by the management to leave the premises after a routine screening of emails, many of them transferred between two of the bank's offices.
The bank, which had dealt with similar incidents before, said in a statement: "As per Merrill Lynch policy, the firm will not tolerate any abuse of its business email system, particularly when extremely offensive material is involved. When the abuse was discovered, after proper investigations had taken place, the individuals concerned were dismissed."
A few weeks later mobile phone company Orange sacked 30 staff it accused of downloading and circulating pornographic material.
Michael Simmonds, the Tory party's head of marketing and membership, leaked a speech by William Hague's deputy leader via email to journalists. The move wasn't appreciated by the top brass when the email was found in his 'out' box and he was asked to leave Conservative central office.
An employee at the TV production company Planet 24 was dismissed after a memo about Big Breakfast presenter Kelly Brook's alleged difficulty with long words appeared on a celebrity gossip website. In this case, there was no proof of an email containing the memo. After a trawl through all their employees' old emails, the employer found one member of staff had been in regular electronic contact with the owner of the website.
