How would you like to spend your day reading other people’s e-mail? Well, according to this News.com story, many large companies are hiring people to do just that: “Bosses bring in e-mail snoops.”

Proofpoint and Forrester Research conducted a recent survey “concerning e-mail security from 406 companies, in the U.S. and the U.K., with more than 1,000 employees. In both regions, 38 percent of respondents said they employed staff to read or otherwise analyze outbound e-mail. In the U.S., 44 percent of companies with more than 20,000 employees said they hire people to snoop on workers’ e-mail. Nearly one in three U.S. companies also said they had fired an employee for violating e-mail policies in the past 12 months and estimated that about 20 percent of outgoing e-mails contain content that poses a legal, financial, or regulatory risk.”

Paranoid? With these survey results, you should be – especially if you work for a large organization! Are you aware of any e-mail snoopers on your company’s payroll?