Was this a violation of a corporate policy? Not unless it could be proven that the downloaded message file was moved away from the corporate computer
A bit later
21:17 Disconnected from everything mid-meeting, laptop goes blank
Clearly his tool was designed and intended to download emails to explicitly take it off the corporate computer. What point is there in releasing a tool for downloading documents ON the corporate computer ("wanted to save some important documents before potentially losing access") when you entirely lose access to that corporate computer in case of termination. This in combination with the cartoons and other rebellious antics as noted in his blog posts I'm not surprised he got fired.
Comments
A bit later
Clearly his tool was designed and intended to download emails to explicitly take it off the corporate computer. What point is there in releasing a tool for downloading documents ON the corporate computer ("wanted to save some important documents before potentially losing access") when you entirely lose access to that corporate computer in case of termination. This in combination with the cartoons and other rebellious antics as noted in his blog posts I'm not surprised he got fired.