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Nearly 60 per cent of companies only notice when email systems go down when users report problems with sending and receiving, according to new research.

The study of 101 companies in the US and UK was commissioned by disaster recovery company Neverfail also found that companies experienced around 69 minutes of email downtime a month. Unsurprisingly, companies that relied on email to complete transactions or process orders were the most affected by downtime.

Respondents to the survey found that on average a company experienced 1.6 unplanned outages per month. Around $50,000 (£25,000) is lost per major incident according to figures from the research,

The researchers said that most companies have yet to overcome the problem of email outages.

"Organisations are placing their future success at risk," says Michael Osterman, President of Osterman Research who conducted the survey. "The need for a continuous availability solution is clear, yet most organisations do not yet have such a solution in place."

The survey found that organisations that relied on BlackBerrys to keep employees in contact with their organisations were subject to even more outages with user errors, telecomx or network problems and faults with an organisation's BlackBerry Enterprise Server contributing to a company's email heartache.

Experts said that while email has become the dominant form of communication for most companies, many of them have been slow to realise these systems need to be available around the clock.

"No longer is email just one of the forms of communication for business, it is the primary form of communication for a successful business," says Andrew Barnes, Senior vice president of Corporate Development at Neverfail. "For global organisations to remain successful, they must have a stable, continuously available email environment."