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System Adminstration and Corporate Ethics?
Not-a-BOFH asks: "About seven years ago while SysAdmin'ing for a (then) small software company, I was approached by the CEO regarding a technical issue. He explained to me that he got a bit hot headed at another employee and sent said person an email that he now wished he hadn't sent. His request to me was to dig through this person's email and delete it before he came in that morning. As the SysAdmin, this was certainly possible for me to do, but I've always tried to remain ethical when having such access to sensitive documents. In the case of email, I explained to the CEO that to me it was like tampering with the U.S. Mail, and I wasn't comfortable doing it. Long story short, my boss had no issue with it, and wound up doing it anyway. Looking back now, I'm not really all that surprised that that decision of mine led to my getting fired, but I've always wondered how many other people have had similar situations happen to them, where personal ethics and CEO heavyhanding came into play, and their job security suffered from the clash."
6. Tell the boss you "programmed" this feature in yourself, and you deserve a raise.
To make it look like it's going to be an all-night job that will take hours of your time and might screw up the mail server.
"I'll start on it now boss, but it's going to take several hours. I don't know what something like this might do to the mail server, it's not really designed to do this."
That alone should scare most people away from it.
If it doesn't, generate some random errors, turn off a few mailboxes and blame it on the 'manual deletion of messages outside of the normal messaging interface'.
Of course, you have to fix it quickly, and then you'll look even better.
Why couldn't the CEO just catch the recipient before the message is read... then just apologize, pre-emptively?
...anyway...
Maybe a sticky-note? A phone call?