There’s no getting away from it; email is today’s de facto standard for business communication. The ease with which they can be created and forwarded means that the sheer volume of messages involved dwarfs the number of other communication types to such an extent that many people are spending a large part of their working day reading, responding, and collaborating via email.
These factors make email management a hot topic and an ever-increasing challenge for all sorts of organisations.
Email management is defined as, “A systematic approach to maximizing the efficiency of email practices and minimizing the negative effects that email handling can have on productivity and job satisfaction.” On a personal level, email management can involve one or more of the following:
Cleaning your inbox of clutter by deleting all unrequired email
Organising your inbox by creating folders
Creating filters or rules for incoming mail
Replying and sending follow-up emails to clients, vendors, etc.
Setting up out-of-office replies
Unsubscribing from mailing lists.
Email Management for Organisations
In organisations it is often left to the individual to decide which of the above practices they use. Consequently, vast quantities of emails are often held in inboxes, sent folders, and deleted items folders. Email servers were never designed to act as repositories for the sheer volume of data they are being asked to handle and this can adversely impact their performance.
Performance issues aside, the handling of email should adhere to the same organisational standards that govern other information and records. GDPR and other legislation mean that without proper management of emails, it is difficult for organisations to meet their legal preservation requirements in the event of litigation and government investigations, increasing the effort and cost in responding to eDiscovery and disclosure. If individuals within an organisation use different email management practices it becomes virtually impossible to have any form of consistency or transparency.
It’s also true that handling email ineffectively within an organisation not only wastes a considerable amount of individual member’s time but can also negatively impact other members and the organisation as a whole. Email handling can account for more than 30% of our workday, perhaps significantly more if handling behaviours are not optimised. That wouldn’t be an issue if that time was productive, but studies have shown that isn’t the case as less than 40% of the emails we receive are relevant so over half the time we spend dealing with email is wasted.
Taking all that into consideration it’s surprising that only 10% of organisations have completed an enterprise-wide email management initiative. One possible reason for this is that many of the email management solutions currently available are complicated and require a significant amount of training and major changes to working practices to implement effectively.
How can MAIL MASTER help?
MAIL MASTER addresses the twin problems of email volume and email sharing turning your email system into a valuable knowledge base that will save your organisation time and money. It makes it easy for organisations to centrally capture and share emails sent and received by its members with only a very minor change to working practices. Unlike other systems there is nothing to install or learn as it works with two programs (apps) everyone uses everyday – your email program and your web browser.
A system of workspaces helps create a classification scheme of your choice to manage how emails and attachments are stored whilst a system of user privileges controls who has access to specific content. It is even possible to set the retention period for data within a workspace to ensure compliance with established business policies and GDPR standards.
Email and file data is stored in a cloud-based database which can be accessed via a highly secure web portal. Its powerful search engine makes retrieving information on specific topics quick and easy whilst the reporting tool can provide a summary of new content to ensure you’re kept abreast of potentially relevant new information.
Email archiving is one of the most common prerequisites for an email management system. Whilst some systems address this by simply removing all emails from a server and saving them to a repository, MAIL MASTER only archives the emails you choose to save. This both reduces the size of your archive and ensures it only contains information relevant to your organisation. As emails are archived as they are sent your archive will always be up to date.
All organisations need to have policies and procedures to define how data is managed. Email is a data type that is often treated differently than others even though it shouldn’t be. An email management system such as MAIL MASTER can provide a vital part of an organisation’s data management strategy. If you’d like to find out how MAIL MASTER could transform the way you use email and save you time and money, why not book a demo?