6 Best Practices That Reduce Email Overload and Costs

80% of all the problems caused in corporate email comes from just 1% of the users, according to a new white paper entitled "6 Best Practices That Reduce Email Overload and Costs" released today by Permessa Corporation.  (I am one of the authors of the report.)

I was particularly interested in the section about the effect of email message size limits.  Many enterprises place size quotas on messages to limit storage and bandwidth costs.  A 10MB limit is common.  But, based on 15 years of working with large enterprises, Permessa concludes that these limits are not effective.  Messages over 10MB account for just 7.6% of the total volume, according to the study.  Blocking them may yield minimal resource savings. 

Yet, messages that are 1-5MB in size account for 59.6% of total email volume.

How can this be? 

Permessa’s analysis of messages sent at large enterprises shows that the most significant burden comes when a medium sized message is sent to a list of recipients or bounces back and forth during a conversation involving multiple people.  This volume can be caused by sending a normal file to a distribution list or a reply-to-all.  Avoiding the problem can be accomplished easily just by using a team collaboration software tool, such as IBM Quickr or Microsoft Sharepoint.

On the other hand, blocking large files may cause business proplems.  Large files are often sent to one person.  For example, it may be a PowerPoint presentation to a customer from sales.  Yet, these tend to be more urgent.  If these large messages are blocked, a critical communication may be delayed.  Therefore, the IT savings can have unwelcome business impact.

The whitepaper addresses topic areas to control email volume and cost, such as handling reply-to-all and managing distribution lists.  Copies are available for free.