The answer to this question is “it depends”.  It depends on what state you are in, what company you work for, what the company handbook says, what your undertanding of the handbook is, what others do, and (perhaps most importantly) who your judge is.  Decisions on this subject are all over the map and are likely to continue to be confused (to put it mildly).  The best answer is to have a private email address and not access it from work. Since they are free, that shouldn’t be much of a problem. If you absolutely must access it from work, don’t download the emails and don’t save copies in your “sent” folder.  Do everything on the web.