>Bringing an email I sent to a friend to the public will indeed be quite an offensive act towards me. I'm not sure about an email I sent to someone who applied for a job in my shop. It's my feeling that it's not really in the private domain. Professional companies know this mechanism and it forces them to reply 'correctly' to applicants.

I have no idea whether the same rules apply to emails, but in the US, a letter belongs to the person who wrote it, not to the recipient. So, to publish the letter, the recipient must get the permission of the sender.

Tamar