lan monitoring / packet sniffers / big brother
Background:
I am overseas and accessing www.aol.com via my LAN and sending and receiving e-mails.
Question:
Can somone see the content of the e-mails that I send and receive?
As I read about the "packet sniffer" programs they seem like a reactive vice proactive measure to accomplish this task. For example it would be virtually impossible to capture every network packet sent by every user on the LAN then decode it and read its content as this would take forever. Are there any other types of "big brother" monitoring software out there that could be installed somewhere on my LAN?
If someone could further explain the capabilities and limitations of these types of software and my situation I would be greatly appreciative.
-PW