6 Best Practices That Reduce Email Overload and Costs

A few proven email management best practices can reduce email impact by up to 80% without affecting employees or the bottom line

By Stefan Mehlhorn, President and CEO, Maria Tricca, Marketing Manager, and Roger Matus, VP of Marketing

There are six practical best practices that most enterprises can implement to reduce the impact of email by up to 80%, without changing the culture or operations of the business. The best practicies include controlling reply-to-all, smart message size limits, preventing mailing group abuse and stopping attachment ping-pong.  These steps will significantly reduce storage and bandwidth costs, and help reduce the information overload that is stifling employee productivity.

Email currently consumes vast amounts of IT resources.

• The average corporate email user sends and receives 149 valid emails per day, according to Osterman Research, a well regarded messaging research firm. At a 10,000 person organization, these messages currently consume 51.2 GB of storage per day, Osterman says. By 2010, they predict that the storage need will grow by 60% to 81.9 GB per day. Not surprisingly, message volume is a major IT concern. 59% of organizations indicated that messaging storage growth is a serious or very serious problem, according to a survey conducted by Osterman.

• 30% of a knowledge worker’s day is consumed by too many messages and too many interruptions, according to Basex, a frequently quoted New York-based research firm. They named this information overload as the "Problem-of-the-Year" for 2008.

As the number and size of messages grow, they will choke existing email systems, drive up the cost of mandatory email archiving and burden knowledge workers, unless the messages are controlled. Unfortunately, most companies deal with email issues the same way. They invest in more servers and bandwidth, issue written policies about appropriate email usage, implement simple restrictions — such as on attachment sizes — and keep their fingers crossed that there won’t be a system outage.

However, there are ways to manage email more efficiently without impacting users or business operations. According to research by Permessa, based on 15 years of experience with leading global enterprises, 80% of email impact comes from just 4% of messages which, in turn, typically come from just 1% of the user community.  controlling reply-to-all, smart message size limits, preventing mailing group abuse and stopping attachment ping-pong are among those best practices that can help.

Here are some examples of manageable events that consumed significant resources. In each case, it is a very small number of employees that had a very big impact:

• At a leading financial services firm, one user regularly sent a 2MB newsletter to every employee. The user included a copy of the corporate logo on the top of the email. Unfortunately, it was a high resolution image. Simply replacing the logo with a smaller version saved 1.5 terabytes (TB) of storage every year.

• The email servers at Total Oil Trading SA (TOTSA) stalled for minutes at a time and impacted service level commitments. It turned out that a few traders periodically sent broadcast emails with large attachments. With minimal effort, TOTSA created an application that significantly shrunk these emails by storing the attachments in a database, restoring email performance to all.

• Linde Gas, a European-based company with more than 16,000 employees, found its email volume increasing too quickly. The company determined that many workers sent 600-700MB of email to themselves each week for storage.  Once the users were provided with alternative, lower cost email storage options, the company saved tens of thousands of dollars each year.

In each case described above, the solution to the problem was simple and did not affect the users or the operation of the business.

Here are Best Practices you can follow to keep your messaging system humming — without causing major upheaval to your infrastructure, employees or bottom line:

Best Practice 1: Control Reply-to-All

When used correctly, the "Reply-to-All" button enables a user to provide relevant comments back to the original email author and other recipients listed in the TO: field. When used incorrectly, the Reply-to-All button can lead to an email storm that consumes storage and bandwidth.

In one widely reported incident in October 2007, a subscriber to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s "Open Source Intelligence Report" wanted to update his email address. Instead of sending his email to the administrator by hitting Reply, he accidentally hit Reply-to-All. His message was sent to the entire DHS distribution list. In the hours that followed, many subscribers responded, also using Reply-to-All.

By the end of the day 7,500 DHS employees generated more than 2.2-million email responses that slowed email processing and filled mailboxes. In addition, once-private email addresses, phone numbers and titles of military personnel and government workers, were revealed to the entire list.