In Australia it is legal to monitor staff emails as long as all employees are aware of the fact this is happening.
There was a recent motion to pass legislation requiring the company to obtain a court order/warrant before the company could look at anyone's email. The motion failed to pass.
It's part of our corporate IT policy. We inform all staff.
this is very country specific. It is however certain that intercepting employess e-mail even on your own company LAN is absolutely illegal in some countries. That is not absolutely true. Intercepting is perhasp OK but reading is not.
My point is that hilst I think this is a good idea for a feature you may find that Sys Admins who just click away activating features may leave their employers open to a law suit. So if it is added as a feature it should be surrounded by the appropriate warning boxes.
You'd have to know what you were doing as you would have to enter an email address for the traffic to be sent to. I think it should definately be there.
Companies these days are required by law to at least keep the messages in storage so they can be produced as evidence. This is especially true of governments as well.
My mail server has this feature but I now route all SMTP through my ASL to make life easier for roaming users.
With the Sarbanes-Oxley broo-ha-ha [that's a piece of legislation in the States that requires listed companies to archive Emails -NOT a homeland security thing, but a corporate corruption thing, since insider trading is (theoretically?) illegal in the States], I am quite sure Astaro has kicked it around, because it would be child's play for them to do. But quite right about the other observation above: it's looked upon quite dimly in other jurisdictions, and Astaro could be party to a nasty whirlpool of litigation.
Fortunately, SMTP is such an easy and standard protocol, it would be a snap to configure a Mail archiving appliance to work with Astaro (many are made in the States now...). Also, since they use Exim for their SMTP proxy, I'm sure with a little Searching you can find how to adjust Astaro to meet this need...
P.S. You are a fool if you don't think that everyone in the world might end up reading every mail message that you compose, in this age of keystroke loggers. But it certainly is at the very least fair and ethical behavior to put employees on notice that they are under surveillance.
But then again, some companies aren't ethical, are they?
perhaps it could be enhanced with public key crypography (as strong as we can get) where the firewall only knows the public key i.e. the private key is not on the firewall and never has been.
That way should the firewall be breached the e-mails are still secure.
