Want to know if your email at work is being monitored? If you are really curious, lay a trap in an email and see if it gets sprung. There are a lot of ways you can do something like this, but here's one way to check to see if your email is being monitored...

Create a web page. It can be on an existing site of yours, or you can sign up for a free web page through Google pages, GeoCities, or any of the other numerous services that allow you to create your own page. Now the key is to make sure you never link to this page so that the page gets zero traffic.

Now create an email with a subject lines that is likely to trigger alarm bells if your email is being monitored. Some examples: "Secret financial information for next quarter", "Proprietary product information", etc... you get the idea. In the body of the email, indicate that the "information" of interest is on your site and include a link to the web page you have created.

Now sit back and wait to see if anyone visits your web page. If you have access to the logs, or the site provides statistics on usage, you can sit back and look at those to see if someone shows up. If you don't have this type of access, you'll need to add monitoring on your site; Google Analytics, sitemeter, and statcounter all offer this as a free service. You can then monitor site usage in this manner to determine if someone from your office shows up at your site.

If they show up, you know that your email is being monitored. If not, it's probably a good idea to send a couple more fake emails with different subjects/body texts just to make sure.