Yes, you should. And you have no recourse, as pointed out in the court decisions referenced above. On a computer they provide it is possible for them to monitor absolutely everything that happens on it, and it is within their rights to do so.

If you are using your home computer and have your work-provided compuer connected to the same network as well, the work computer can not easily nor legally determine what yur home computer is doing and relay that information to the company.

To the point of the VPN connection, there are two ways a VPN connection can be confgured. One is to route all traffic via the VPN network. This basically makes the computer a secured endpoint on the network and all data (even the FT browsing) goes via the VPN, into the corporate network and then out via their firewall(s). The other configuration is called split-tunneling. In this config the laptop routes some data to the corporate network and some directly out the local internet connection, so the corporate network would see the Outlook traffic, but not the FT traffic. Split-tunneling is less secure, but provides better performance for the laptop user. Which one you have is a function of the configuration your IT department has chosen to implement, though split-tunneling is less common, IME.