Crashing the Inbox:Managing Email in Today's Information Age

Take a look at your email inbox right now ... go ahead, and see how many emails are in your inbox. 100? 500? 2,000? 4,000? Are all of the emails organized in a manner that allows you to easily find what you want? Or are just a scattered few of the most important emails catalogued in a folder? What about colleagues' emails that could be pertinent and valuable to your organization?

There are too many emails to start with and, when you add junk and spam email to the equation, actually managing the flow of information through an organization's email system is a daunting task. And there is no doubt that the most important form of digital communication today is email. In some respects, due to the fact that email is a written communication that can be saved and tracked, it may be THE most important form of communication for your organization.

But it's not managed that way.

Approximately 171 billion emails are sent every day (Q1 2006), with spam messages counting for 70% of the traffic, according to the Radicati Group, (www.radicati.com) which tracks these statistics. 171 billion messages per day means almost 2 million emails are sent every second. Although about 70% to 72% (or between 120 billion and 123 billion) of them are spam and viruses, genuine emails are sent by around 1.4 billion users. And this number is just going to grow exponentially. The number of active mailboxes is estimated to go from 1.4 billion active mailboxes to 2.5 billion mailboxes by 2010. That's almost doubling in the next four years.

Being able to effectively navigate through these messages and separate, save and catalog the messages that contain valuable corporate/organization information is becoming more and more crucial, to the point that it cannot be ignored. Not only is the loss of valuable organizational information and knowledge at risk, but security, legal and regulatory compliance must be considered as well. E-discovery is a term that is going to be heard again and again and email is going to be a key area for organizations to be concerned about when protecting themselves.

What To Do Now

So, "smart" management of emails is now necessary from a corporate and government perspective, as there is simply too much valuable information being transmitted ... yet all in the midst of billions of unnecessary and non-pertinent messages.

So, how should it be managed? What can we do? To figure this out, an organization needs to figure out what their real end goals are for an email management solution.

Email management should be viewed as crucial to any organization's knowledge management initiatives—right from the start. Organizations need to capture, assign, share and retain information about correspondence received and sent and will want to make sure this can be done as easily as possible from the end-user perspective.

Goals of an effective email management solution:

Easily share valuable organizational information;

• Make information more accessible; u Seamless integration with the email client;
• Ease of use for the end user to save time, not create more work;
• Ensure compliance with legislative and corporate requirements;
• Secure email/information management;
• Easily separating out "junk" emails from the valuable emails; and
• Managing email documents/attachments just as easily as the email itself.

An email system must be able to easily integrate with your corporate systems and applications and it must be easy to capture and store emails in a central location. Ease of use for the end user is also critical; despite the ever-growing influx of email, saving time and creating efficiencies in managing the information is still possible and is ultimately crucial in effective email management. The system must also be effective in managing the security of the information as well as handling compliance with any regulatory or legal requirements. And, as email management is a subset of correspondence management, a system that can manage information on paper as well as electronic correspondence within one unified system makes good business sense.

In short, any organization has the potential to be overwhelmed with managing a growing amount of correspondence, but a proactive plan and an effective system will make the difference—as long as it is a top priority as of yesterday, not tomorrow.

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TOWER Software (www.towersoft.com) is the proven leader in Enterprise Content Management solutions, empowering customers to take ownership of their data and achieve success through information management. The company's award-winning TRIM Context software provides electronic document management, records management, web-content management, imaging, workflow and document-based collaboration into a single package.

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