Email – The Godzilla of Network Challenges

If your firm is like most others, email is becoming a larger challenge every day. Most firms find that 80% or more of their communications are via email. Yet email is rarely managed; leaving firms in a situation where the bulk of their valuable data is handled on a haphazard “per user” basis.

Most of the firms we work with have at least one (and sometimes more) partner who has an enormous inbox. Our current record holder had something on the order of 18,000 mail messages in their inbox! Microsoft’s official stance on this type of thing is very negative and there are numerous tech notes and articles describing the problems with large single folders in Outlook.

The primary problem with a single large folder is performance. Outlook is slow when you have a huge inbox, and user complaints are nearly constant. These same users however are often not willing to do anything about the situation, insisting they need this very large inbox to work efficiently. The second issue is corruption. Larger mailboxes have a much higher likelihood of corruption which can result in either downtime while the corruption is repaired, or worse, data loss.

The user feels the need to keep a large inbox in order to find mail messages easily. So what they do is to locate a message from a particular sender, then hit the “sort” button to arrange all mail in order of sender. Once this is accomplished, the user can then move up and down through the messages to find the one they want. As the mailbox grows, these sorts are slower and slower. The movement within messages also slows so the user becomes more and more frustrated.

The answer to these problems is rarely system based, but many firms go out and buy the biggest, nastiest email server they can fine and expect it to fix a desktop problem. This is not to say that an old or overburdened server cannot be responsible for performance issues, but more often the problem is user habits.

The key to solving the problem however involves a combination of both solution and policy decisions. The policy decisions are much harder for firms to deal with so whatever the firm chooses as its solution to the email dilemma it has to be easier for the user and not harder. At Afinety we are always looking for products and solutions that make it “easier to do the right thing.” This leads to universal adoption, better performance and user satisfaction.

There are some very good answers available however, and at our upcoming seminars we will present some of the solutions to the email monster. We look forward to showing you how you can not only tame the monster but more importantly, leverage the single most valuable communication tool in your firm.