Containing the E-Mail Explosion

By Jeff Feinman

August 21, 2008 —  (Page 1 of 3)
With no end in sight to the annual increases in e-mail usage and storage requirements, analysts and e-mail management companies say it is critical to know what is filling up employee inboxes. Doing so without trampling on employees’ privacy, however, can be a delicate dance.

E-mail usage is expected to grow by 25 to 40 percent annually for the next few years, according to the Radicati Group. Today, the average corporate user sends and receives approximately 156 e-mails per day; by 2012, that figure is expected to swell to 233 per day. The Radicati Group further estimates that the daily average e-mail storage requirement per corporate user will increase from 18.8MB this year to 28.8MB in 2012.

Reports from the trenches appear to confirm the trend. At Azaleos, which manages e-mail for Microsoft Exchange, CTO Keith McCall said customers’ e-mail storage grew 3 percent year over year in 2005 and 7 percent in 2006; last year, by contrast, Azaleos customers experienced 20 percent year-over-year e-mail storage growth. And McCall expects the tally to continue its upward trend.

To stem the tide, organizations should first analyze the types of e-mail flooding users’ inboxes, said Jesse Wilkins, principal consultant with Access Sciences, a Houston-based enterprise content and records management consulting firm. Much of the e-mail in a typical user’s box is what Wilkins called “Bacn”—newsletters, listserv messages and CCs that the user wants to read, but not at the moment the e-mail hits.

“If individual users and organizations just looked at those things—the ‘me too’ messages and the CCs and BCCs—they could reduce e-mail usage by 50 percent to 80 percent,” Wilkins said. “That would release a lot of the need for storage and backup.”

Companies should set policies and processes for routing e-mails so that the files don’t bombard users’ mailboxes, said Sabrina Parsons, CEO of Palo Alto Software, which targets its Email Center Pro e-mail management system at the small business team environment.

“Between spam and personal e-mail,” Parsons said, “it’s inevitable that people declare ‘e-mail bankruptcy,’ ” the term for simply wiping out unread e-mails because it’s impossible to wade through them all.

Related Search Term(s): e-mail, professional development, Access Sciences, Azaleos, Palo Alto Software

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