A Spanish office worker has been jailed for two years after hacking into his former manager's account and distributing personal and private emails to all and sundry.

Some of the offending messages provided insights into the manager's sex life, The Guardian reports. Recipients of the messages included the supervisor's ex-missus, current mistress, and the mayor at the council where he worked, along with sundry friends and acquaintances.

The unnamed perp was jailed for two years for privacy offences and ordered to pay a fine of €3,240 by a Barcelona judge. In addition, the email hacker was also told to pay €4,000 compensation to his victim.

The victim incorrectly assumed he'd got rid of his old emails when he left his former Barcelona-based employers in 2006. The tactics and motive of his cyber-nemesis remain unclear. Only one in 50 of the emails illicitly distributed contained "highly personal information", but this was enough to bring in Spain's strict privacy laws.

In the absence of firm facts it's tempting to think that the manager had simply deleted rather than erased the emails (if that). Sadly the contents of the messages are also unknown, at least until Pedro Almodóvar gets involved in dramatising what has the makings of a juicy plot, perhaps to be titled Office Workers on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. ®

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