Privacy in mail is a basic right cited in article 12 in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), which says that nobody will suffer arbitrary interference in their private or family life or home or correspondence. Under Spanish law, this right is enshrined in article 18 of the Constitution. It guarantees the right to privacy and private communication, and opens the possibility of the law limiting the use of computers in order to guarantee the honor and personal and family privacy of citizens.

Spanish law fine-tunes the concept of privacy by introducing the term privacy in the penal code. In the first paragraph of article 197.1, jail terms ranging from one to four years and fines of 12 to 24 months are established for those who, with the goal of violating the privacy of another, and without his consent, takes power of their papers, letters, emails or any other documents or personal effects or intercepts their telecommunications or uses devices for eavesdropping, transmission, recording or playing of sound or image or another communication signal.
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Thus letters like emails are considered secret, likened to a prolongation of the person his or herself. So it is not necessary to probe if the letter, brochure, telegram or email contains a secret or confidencial information. From all this, we deduce the fact that the right to privacy is violated with a simple interference in one's personal affairs, as are letters or personal emails.

Interferring with mail
Traditional mail and email are the same in as far as their protection from interference or violation are concerned. Neither can be opened, handled, retained or violated in any way without the express consent of the user of the account or permission from a court.

In the United States, for example, it would be unheard of for somebody to stick a paper, letter or package into the mailbox of another person because these have no slots for such a purpose, unlike in other countries. Only authorized people have keys for introducing such correspondence.

In the case of interference with email in a company several variables come into play, such as whether the domain belongs to the company or is a private one belonging to the worker. In the same way, spying against the sender or content of a message doesn't have the same legal consequence. In Spain, one famous case was that of Deutsche Bank, which fired an employee for sending 140 emails unrelated to his work. The Supreme Court of Catalonia said the bank was in fact justified in looking at the employee's email for the purposes of ascertaining the unquestionable nature of the messages seen for legal purposes.

Where do you file a complaint?
Someone whose mail has been tampered with can resort to normal courts with full knowledge that this kind of crime is listed in the penal code. To file a complaint online about illegal interception of telecommunications, the plaintiff can turn to the Data Protection Agency, or to the corresponding departments of the Civil Guard�([email protected]) or National Police ([email protected] or [email protected])