Sunbelt Software White Paper Sample

E-mail is the de facto file transport mechanism. Most people do not use FTP for sending files. Instead, they use e-mail, even for sending 5 MB to 10 MB files. E-mail use is growing at a rate of about 20% per year. Message stores are growing from 25% to 35% per year, depending upon the size of the company, the industry, and so on. For many companies, this growth rate is 50% to 100% per year. Therefore, e-mail storage is becoming a very critical issue, primarily because of all the attachments and everything else that is stored in e-mail.

The average employee sends and receives about 140 e-mails every day. This means that 20,000 to 30,000 e-mails per employee per year are sent and received. The average user spends 34% of each day using an e-mail client. This activity includes looking for contacts, looking for old attachments, sending and receiving e-mail, and managing tasks. Therefore, e-mail is critical for almost everybody who uses it.

An e-mail message contains very valuable content. E-mail is not just for simple communication anymore. People use it to send purchase orders, contracts, and customer communications. Message threads and other very important content are stored in e-mail. It has become the primary repository for many types of critical business records. IT professionals report that their number one problem in managing e-mail is growth in e-mail storage. This has been their main problem for about three years. In the surveys that Osterman Research has conducted, IT professionals have chosen from a list of 35 to 45 problems, rating each problem on a scale of one to five. Consistently, growth in e-mail storage is the number one problem, for all the reasons already described.