"Here’s where e-mail’s socialism turns from strength to weakness: It doesn’t matter if the message comes from a spammer hawking Viagra, your wife asking you to pick up some wine, your boss telling the company that Monday is a holiday, or a client asking for a meeting at his office at 11 a.m. In today’s inboxes, all e-mail messages are equal."

Once you get under the hood of corporate email, you see something that is both amazing and at the same time terrifying.  Email is used (and misused) for just about everything and the technologies that power it and policies that govern it are barely keeping up if at all.  There is no shortage of email bashing out there including this recent NY Times piece.  I don’t disagree that email is both our best friend and worst enemy in the workplace – and can even be a source of stress (via Freakonomics Blog), but the question remains of what to do about it.

Om Malik put an article out entitled "Why we hate e-mail" that gets at the core of the matter and provides some suggestions for how to fix it.  The quotes in this post are from that article.  Some of his observations are consistent with our focus on understanding the difference between high-value correspondence and low-value correspondence.  Regardless of why you need to separate it – for better Inbox management, for archiving efficiency, for improved supervision, etc. being able to segment communications based on their importance or relevance to you is essential as volumes grow and methods evolve beyond email.  Om’s article offers up a chart by the Radicati Group on average emails sent/received per day putting the number around 130 in 2007 and growing from there.

I think these are a bit high as our own research and customer work has shown this number to be closer to 50 per employee per day.  Here’s the breakdown based on MessageGate analysis:

Inbound:    13.5      
Outbound:    9      
Internal:    30      
Total email per day per employee:    52.5    

Volume is certainly growing and there are no signs of the corporate dependency on email subsiding anytime soon.  The best approach?  Embrace it and put technologies in place to control/improve/manage it including the ability to differentiate between email that matters and email noise.  Listen to an interview with me on this topic here.

"E-mail ought to be reinvented to meet the needs of our always-connected lives."