Text messaging and social media communications may be popular, but anyone who thinks that email is dead is sorely mistaken.

According to a report from the Radicati Group, the number of email accounts worldwide is expected to grow from 3.1 billion in 2011 to roughly 4.1 billion by the end of 2015. Most of these newly created accounts will be in the corporate world stating:

“Over the next four years, however, we expect corporate email accounts to increase at a faster pace than consumer email accounts. This will be particularly due to the growth of affordable cloud-based email services. Many organizations are using cloud-based email services as a way to extend email services to kiosk workers who may not have had access to email in the past.”

Now, as any email administrator knows, every newly created email account can mean trouble – especially when it comes to email management.

It is estimated that 92 percent of employees spend up to an hour a day searching for emails, and a little over 8 percent claim that they spend up to three hours every day searching for emails! 64 percent also stated that they were forced to delete important emails at one time or another because their inbox was too full.

These statistics create problems for companies. The first results in productivity loss. Any employee who is spending time searching for emails is not spending time doing their job.

The second statistic could spell legal troubles for a company. If employees delete emails that by law need to be retained, failure to produce them could result in fines and/or lawsuits.

Suggestions for Better Email Management for Users

Managing email can certainly be handled through the IT department, but when users take an active role in managing their inboxes it makes for a less restrictive environment.

A few ways that users can help take back their inbox are as follows:

Limit the use of cc: and Reply to All – In a society where we all need to document everything the carbon copy feature becomes abused. Most of the time, people who we think should be included on an email really don’t have the interest or the time.

This goes for the Reply to All feature as well. If only one or two people need to see your response, don’t send it off to everyone. It just clutters up their inboxes.

Conversely, we shouldn’t insist on being cc’d on everything either. There are times when we can afford to be kept out of the loop.

Tell the recipient when you need a reply by – Marking an email as high priority hardly works any more. Too many co-workers suffer from the boy who cried wolf syndrome so they mark everything as urgent. As a result, this gets ignored.

Something you can do to show that a message has content that needs to be addressed is to include a reply by date in the subject line or explain the priority here. Taking the time to signal this as a high priority message will usually clue your reader in to its importance.

Strive to keep your inbox empty at the end of every day – When someone leaves the office at the end of the day there should be no emails lingering for tomorrow. Go through and address what is important, delete the junk and organize the rest. Simply creating a folder for emails that need attention in the future will help keep your inbox organized and clean, but only if you use it.

What Can Be Done From the IT Side

Of course, email management cannot be left entirely up to the users. There needs to be a solid strategy put into place by the IT department to effectively control the volume of messages sent and received.

A solid plan for email management consists of the following:

Adequate storage – If you industry requires you to back up email and retain them for any length of time then you need to make sure you have the storage capability to do this. The elasticity of a cloud based solution gives organizations much more leeway when it comes to expanding storage to fit their needs so the cloud has become a popular solution, however on-site storage can also be planned for adequately to meet your company’s needs.

Policies – Fair and effective policies need to be part of your email management strategy. Include stakeholders from different departments and have them provide input regarding their needs when it comes to email.

Management software – Having reputable email management software to handle tasks like spam and content filtering, eDiscovery and archiving will certainly provide a cost-effective solution to handling these tasks opposed to having staff dedicate expensive man hours to perform these tasks.

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