Worried your boss is reading your email at work? Your worst fears may be real. Of 301 large U.S. companies surveyed 41 percent say they hire staff to read and analyze outgoing mail. The numbers come from Proofpoint’s annual Outbound Email and Data Loss Prevention survey which conducted the study this past March of U.S. companies with 20,000 plus employees.

Among the businesses surveyed 44 percent said they investigated a suspected email leak of company secrets, 26 percent said they fired people for violating email policies. So much for privacy.

The European Union will investigate Microsoft’s support for the Open Document Format (ODF) in Office. It wonders whether the move increases competition.

This comes just a day after Microsoft, with great fanfare, said it would add support for ODF, Adobe PDF and even the XML Paper Specification in an Office Service Pack due next year.

Yahoo said Thursday that Edward Kozel resigned from its board of directors. The company will reduce the size of its board from 10 directors to nine and delayed its shareholder meeting from July 3 to "around the end of July 2008."

Investor Carl Icahn has proposed an alternate slate of 10 directors in a proxy fight and will likely have to drop one since Yahoo is cutting the size of its board. In a brief SEC filing, Yahoo said Kozel was resigning to spend more time with his family.

Solid Documents, provider of document utility products, announced the release of Solid Converter PDF to Word v4, the company’s PDF to Word conversion solution. This version includes a WYSIWYG interface so you can convert exactly what you want, drag and drop PDF creation, improved image and table extraction, and a new scripting tool for batch conversion.

Sonasoft announced the availability of its new version of SonaSafe Suite for Microsoft Exchange, SQL and Windows Servers. This release contains many advance features including dynamic mailbox backups, customized ports, enhanced replication and recovery capability.

Sonasoft provides a high-availability solution, protecting data from hardware/software failures and human errors. SonaSafe application maintains the redundant, standby server by continually updating the data with that retrieved from the primary system. The standby system can take over instantly in the event of primary system failure. The standby system can be on-site, or located at a remote site for protection against natural or man-made disasters.

As reported by Todd Bishop’s Microsoft Blog, Microsoft has launched the new "LiveSearch cashback" program. The company officially announced the new service today, actually while I was writing this post.

The concept: People use Live Search for stuff to buy, and Microsoft gives them–can you guess from the program’s name–cash back. It’s a simple concept: Microsoft pays people to use its search service–and not for the first time.

Microsoft said on Wednesday that starting some time next year it will make it easier for users of an open-source rival to work with Microsoft Office.

Without adding any special software to Office, users will be able to open documents sent to them in the open source Open Document Format (ODF), the company said. As well, users will be able to edit and save documents in that format.

One of the researchers behind ScanAlert, the "Hacker Safe" certification company McAfee recently acquired, is facing fraud charges in Indiana. Brett Oliphant, whose title had been vice president of security services before the Napa, California, company was acquired by McAfee in January, is facing 11 counts of securities fraud in transactions that allegedly brought in more than $1.215 million.

Oliphant and his brother Bryan were charged in December. Their trial is set for Nov. 18 at the Elkhart County Superior Court in Indiana. ScanAlert built technology for auditing and then certifying Web sites as "Hacker Safe." McAfee paid $54.9 million for the company in January and has since renamed the certification service "McAfee Safe."

Thirty-eight people were charged Monday with stealing names, Social Security numbers, credit card data and other personal information from unsuspecting Internet users as part of a global crime ring. The Romanian-based phishing scams sought to rip off thousands of consumers and hundreds of financial institutions, according to indictments unsealed in Los Angeles and New Haven, Connecticut.

The two related cases marked the latest example of what the Justice Department describes as a growing worldwide threat posed by organized crime.

Microsoft sees tens of millions of corporate email accounts moving to its data centers over the next five years, shifting to a business model that may thin profit margins but generate more revenue.

In an interview ahead of the Reuters Global Technology, Media and Telecoms Summit, Chris Capossela, who manages Microsoft’s Office products, said the company will see more and more companies abandon their own in-house computer systems and shiftto "cloud computing," a less expensive alternative.