<p>I certainly wouldn’t be happy if I learned that my friends’ spouses had carte blanche access to my private correspondence but it would freak me out more to learn that any employee at my firm had given his/her spouse the password to the firm’s email system! That is a serious breach of security!</p>
<p>^ yes, sorry</p>
<p>My husband has a work email but at home we share a family email - family and friends use that email to communicate with both of us</p>
<p>Aquamarinesea, have you thought about talking about this with your friend? Have you told her that there are personal things you want to share with her without including her husband and that sometimes email is the easiest way for you to do that? </p>
<p>It is certainly her right to have her email set up the way she wants it (even if it makes her friends uncomfortable) but maybe she can be a part of the solution so that you two can talk comfortably without her H knowing everything. There can be several options, some of which are included here (talk on the phone or in person or get used to the H seeing everything) another option is for her to set up another email just for the two of you to talk on. If you can’t come up with something that you both are comfortable with, you may need to rethink the level of friendship with her.</p>
<p>Picking up the phone and answering, and taking a message is not the same thing as an email account it’s just apples and oranges.</p>
<p>Sharing a phone number is not the same as email accounts. For instance, I may live one kind of message in a friends cell and one kind on her home phone answering machine.</p>
<p>I don’t think you can compare reading an email to sharing a landline, unless you include listening in as you have a conversation on the landline. </p>
<p>That said, my DH has access to my email and I have access to his, although I have never looked through his email. At one time, he was opening mail to me on our main home account and I asked him not to do that. I have no secrets from him, but if a friend sends me an email she is talking to ME not him and I asked him to respect that person’s privacy. I would also say, that if someone shares something with me that does not in any way involve my spouse, I don’t think it is right for me to share it with him. </p>
<p>I have, however, broken my own code of ethics. A friend has been telling me for several years how unhappy she is in her marriage. She started to see another person and I told her I did NOT want to know anything about it. I was not being judgmental - but we are friends as couples and I didn’t want to be in the position of knowing this as we all sat around at dinner. My husband noticed I was avoiding going out as couples and I finally told him why. </p>
<p>Sorry to get off topic.</p>
<p>Geeps – Does “everything” include things that one spouse has a duty not to disclose to anyone? A client’s confidential information? An employer’s trade secrets? And if you understand why spouses would have to refrain from disclosing work-related information to which a confidentiality obligation attaches, why wouldn’t you understand that the same sort of obligation could arise from a spouse’s personal relationships? I don’t think that respecting the confidentiality of certain information necessarily constitutes “keeping secrets” from a spouse.</p>
<p>I don’t have DH’s passwords and he doesn’t have mine. I have no interest in reading his mail and he has no interest in reading mine. If something in an email I’ve gotten from friend or family is funny or interesting I usually share the tidbit with him and vice versa. </p>
<p>I do have his passwords to things that matter - like his bank accounts. :)</p>
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<p>for my wife and I they are exactly the same…obviously anyone who e-mails us knows that either may read it. It’s like leaving a message on our answering machine.</p>
<p>I guess an email address like <a href="mailto:geeps_family@geepmail.com">geeps_family@geepmail.com</a> would make that clear.</p>
<p>At the office, all of our work emails are logged and stored for probably at least five years. If I want to tell someone something that I don’t want to get out (outside of that person telling others), then I go to their office or ask them to come to mine.</p>
<p>^^If it’s a shared email account, and your friends know that, I have no problem with that, and the correspondence would be as brief and impersonal as a phone message. Some of us use our personal email as we would regular mail. In that case, it would be like opening someone else’s mail, and in the case of this husband, answering her letters for her.
Too each his own. I’m glad everyone in my family has the same idea about personal boundaries as I do. I can imagine differences in this area could cause a lot of friction.
It’s not that I write anything I wouldn’t want my family to read. But my friends expect that they are writing to me, not my entire family, when they are contacting me. I have several women friends who are not necessarily friends with my Dh. Why would they want to be talking to him when they hardly know him?</p>
<p>geepmail…I kind of like the sound of that…lol</p>
<p>I don’t go onto DH’s email account and he doesn’t go on mine. We are separate people, and we each have many friends who are separate from our spouses. That’s the way it is and we’re fine with that.</p>
<p>I guess I’d odd here. Me and my husband share an email account, so of course we can read each others emails. I don’t read many of his because they’re not too interesting to me, but often I will tell him he got an email from so and so…to which he asks, well, what does it say? It seems to work just fine for us, we forget less with two people reading things.</p>
<p>But occasionally it has gotten me into trouble, like when my high school best friend reminisced inappropriately for a joint email account. Oh well, I don’t really have anything to hide.</p>
<p>I’d challenge the husband’s reply to my personal email to his wife. I’d ask him to respect the friendship between his wife and me and to refrain from reading personal correspondence from me to his wife. </p>
<p>And I’d let the wife know that unless that is done, the email correspondence will have to change, and private exchanges will have to find another venue, such as talking in person.</p>
<p>It’s one thing if it’s a family email address; it’s another thing entirely if the correspondence is meant to be an exchange between two friends. She may be perfectly okay with her husband’s access to, comments on, and replies to your emails to her, but that doesn’t mean you need to be.</p>
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<p>and you shouldn’t…but not every couple has the need for 2 e-mail accounts. I don’t think anyone is talking about logging into their spouse’s e-mail.</p>
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Yes, that’s exactly what we’re talking about, one spouse reading email intended for the other.</p>
<p>It’s perfectly fine if you don’t have the need for two email accounts and have only one, so long as those who write to you know they are writing to the BOTH of you, and not just you alone.</p>
<p>^logging into another account is not the same as opening an e-mail from a shared account</p>
<p>Our account is just under my husband’s name. So anyone who is writing to me has to know that he can read it, it’s obvious. Now people that just write to him don’t necessarily know. Friends and family know. But he doesn’t have guys writing to him pouring out their personal problems, and I don’t answer back to emails addressed to him unless it’s appropriate. We also have only joint checking accounts and credit cards, really don’t keep anything separate at all.</p>
<p>The problem is, when he set up his email at this house, I was too lazy to get my own. Now everyone knows his email as mine, and people don’t send a lot of personal stuff over email anyways. He would be suspicious if all of a sudden I had a need for my own email.</p>
<p>workinprogress2 - good for you! That’s an awkward situation and I salute your decision to remain uninformed in this instance.</p>