Employees struggle with stingy inbox quotas

 

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By Barry Collins

Posted on 2 Jul 2008 at 08:42

Employees are routinely deleting important emails or even storing work messages in personal accounts to get around tight mailbox limits, according to new research.

Almost a third of employees surveyed had work mailbox limits of 100MB or less, which is particularly restrictive in the era of multi-megabyte attachments, according to email solutions provider C2C.

By contrast, webmail accounts such as those on offer from Google's Gmail, have capacities in excess of 7GB.

Not surprisingly, therefore, employees are constantly seeking ways to get around their email quotas, with two thirds admitting to storing email outside the company email system, including in personal accounts.

That, according to C2C, raises all manner of security and legal issues. "eDiscovery is becoming much more important in the context of civil litigation," claims Dave Hunt, CEO at C2C. "Companies that fail to produce emails in a timely manner risk paying millions of dollars in fines, not to mention loss of reputation and possibly revenue."

The survey also found that 65% of staff have to manually delete messages to stay within their alloted quota, even though 67% had to refer to emails at least three-months-old on a regular basis.