Nasty Emails from Colleague

unlikelyheroine

If the email had been sent to you, I would suggest you consider reporting it to your boss. As it hasn't, and you seem to have stumbled across it in someone else's emails, I would leave it and move on.

It's a job. Not everyone is going to like you. I consider it unprofessional to badmouth colleagues and doing it on email is very silly, but reporting this could backfire on you. Even if you have legitimate access to another colleague's email for work purposes, I doubt you have access for the purposes of finding a personal email and reporting it to your boss because you don't like it. Unless your job involves monitoring personal emails of other staff then leave it.

I think all this advice about how to get this person to know you have read the message or telling the boss is all a bit pie in the sky to be honest. To most bosses this would, rightly or wrongly, seem like nonsense that they would be fed up having to deal with, particularly when you have to explain how you came by the message.

If this person is directly hostile to you, that may be worth raising with the boss.