In Pure Power Boot, 587 F Supp 548 [SDNY 2008]), the plaintiff/employer (PPBC) sued former employees who resigned to create their own, competing gym. After the employees left, PPBC accessed their work computers. One employee had saved his user-name and password on the company computer. PPBC was able to use that information, and information found in the e-mail stored in that account, to access personal e-mail accounts stored on outside servers - including Gmail and Hotmail accounts. None of the e-mails were drafted on the work computer, although they may have been viewed on it. Some of the e-mails were privileged (id. at 553-54). The employees sought the preclusion of the e-mails, based on violations of the Electronic Communications Privicy Act (18 USC 2510), the SCA (18 USC 2707) and other reasons which do not apply here (id. at 554). The court ruled that the employer's action in logging into the remote server to access the e-mail accounts was a violation of the SCA (id. at 556). That court also considered whether the employer was authorized to access those accounts, as the SCA only prohibits unauthorized access. The court reviewed the employer's technology policy and whether the employee had an expectation of privacy as to those accounts (id. at 559). The court summarily rejected the employer's arguments that the employee "gave implied consent to unlimited access to all of the employee's personal e-mail accounts, based on the assertion that he accessed his personal Hotmail account, at least once, on Plaintiff's computer" (id.). The court noted that if a company's computer use policy makes it clear that the company may monitor the employee's computer, the employee then has no expectation of privacy as to the workplace computer (id. at 550-60). This language did not protect the company because the e-mails at issue were not stored on the company equipment, nor did the company have any business relationship to those accounts (id. at 560). The court also refused to accept the plaintiffs' argument that leaving a username and password stored on the computer constituted authorization (id at 561). The court added that the plaintiff would have been able to obtain these e-mails through the discovery process (id. at 569). The court determined that the appropriate sanction for plaintiffs' conduct was to preclude the affirmative use of the e-mails, but to allow their use for impeachment purposes, noting the challenge of crafting a solution where the plaintiff obtained information to which it would otherwise have been entitled, where defendants were accused of having "unclean hands", by nature of the allegations in the action, and where precluding the evidence would provide the defendants an "evidentiary windfall " (id. at 570-71).