Ohhhhh......
Blaming sysadmins? Aside from it's unethical for sysadmins to do so, it's probably also illegal in many jurisdictions.
I use to use a utility for Exchange to extract mail from the server to a PST account for those employees that departed. Technically a sysadmin could read the Email, but why? [The company later came out with a directive to stop using the tool anyways.]
As for Google, who knows what they are doing sometimes....