Corporate computers are fair game for snooping in the U.S. (Some European countries have stricter privacy rules.) So in-house spooks can divert copies of incoming and outgoing e-mail to a separate file for monitoring.

FORBES: Get Hunt and Liddy on the Phone

The system, called key-escrow, would give police and other law enforcement bodies wide-ranging powers to intercept e-mail, read confidential documents and tap into systems, without monitoring by the courts.

BBC: Security and law enforcement: the government view

Such monitoring is increasingly useful, because of the growing use of e-mail, faxes and the Internet by businesses to communicate.

ECONOMIST: Those perfidious Anglo spies

Virus-monitoring company MessageLabs said it had detected and stopped 155, 528 e-mail viruses by the end of November - a rate of one every three minutes.

BBC: Kournikova computer virus hits hard

The aspiration of the company is to build a series of technologies that encompasses an electronic monitoring and alert engine for activity that occurs not only on its own e-mail servers, but also on third party solutions including AOL, Yahoo, Gmail and text messaging, and eventually on social networking sites, such as MySpace and Facebook, too.

FORBES: CES update: Can Mousemail.com make the Internet a safer place for children?