(FORTUNE Magazine) – Dear Annie: How private is an employee's e-mail? What can an employee do if he or she suspects that the company is snooping around in the e-mail? --Sleepless in Cyberspace

Dear Sleepless: I confess I've enjoyed speculating about what the hell you went and wrote (in a fit of pique? a moment of passion? a major pout?). The mind reels. But I have to tell you: One of these days, you may deeply regret having hit the send button. While 80% of major U.S. companies today use e-mail, only about a third of them have bothered to spell out their policies regarding privacy. No matter. Whether or not they've come out and said so, employers do have the right to "snoop," as you put it, and you can't stop them.

A recent court case has set an ominous precedent. Earlier this year a sales manager at Pillsbury and his boss were exchanging e-mail in which some higher-up was described as "a backstabbing bastard." Someone at the company read this and fired both of them. The sales manager sued to get his job back on the grounds that his privacy had been invaded. Tough luck, said the federal district judge who heard the case: Pillsbury owns the system, hence everything on it, and so can browse with impunity.

A good rule of thumb, says David Sobel of the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington, D.C., is to think of an e-mail message not as a sealed letter but as a postcard--and, moreover, a postcard that might well be read and copied in every post office it passes through, then kept on file for years afterward. Yikes. This advice may come too late for you, but in the future don't say anything via e-mail that you wouldn't want announced over the company loudspeaker.

Dear Annie: Since 1993 I haven't been able to find work with a decent company. Why are companies refusing to hire people with experience? --Regular Joe

Dear Joe: Well, the short answer is, they're not. A labor crunch is developing in many parts of the country, especially in retailing, construction, aerospace, and insurance, and lots of employers are desperately seeking qualified people.

I spoke with several labor economists and headhunters about your plight, and they ask: Are you overqualified for the jobs you've sought? If so, when you go to interviews, are you addressing concerns that potential employers might have about that?

The way to approach this in your interview is to talk a bit (don't brag, though) about how you got along with your fellow workers. Did you play on the company softball team, write articles for the in-house newspaper, go out of your way to cover for someone who went off on a family leave? "What you want to convey is that, although a layoff may have knocked you down a rung or two, you want to fit in and will work at being a real part of the team," says Kenneth Goldstein, an economist at the Conference Board. "Otherwise a potential boss may worry that either you don't plan to stick around in your job long, or that--if you do stay--your qualifications will make you discontented and standoffish. Nobody wants that."

Something else to consider: are you willing to move? "A lot of downsized people are having a hard time because they can't, or won't, go where the jobs are," notes Mark Zandi at Regional Financial Associates in West Chester, Pennsylvania. "One reason is that people tend to assume the economy is the same everywhere in the nation. It isn't." Some boomtowns now: Minneapolis, Atlanta, Detroit, Columbus, Ohio--in fact, "any decent-sized city in the U.S., except in the Northeast, and excluding Los Angeles."

Dear Annie: Ever since my company adopted roundtable project management, it is harder and harder to get things done. Do you have any suggestions for keeping this new management tool from getting totally bogged down in office politics? Please answer soon as I am going crazy here. --Discouraged and Dismayed

Dear Discouraged: Beats me. I checked with every project-management specialist I could find, including the Project Management Institute and the folks at McKinsey, Booz Allen, and the Boston Consulting Group. None of them have ever heard the term "roundtable project management." Offhand, since you asked for my opinion, I'd say it sounds like a nifty way to pass the buck--around the table, so to speak--if a project should run into deep marinade. This guess is based on a time-tested principle: The greater the number of people who are nominally responsible for a given task, the less inclined any one of them will be to do much real work on it or to shoulder any blame if it goes awry. But I could be wrong. Readers? Anybody out there familiar with roundtable project management? Any thoughts on how to depoliticize it? Send 'em in.