Email Filtering + Business Email Management

UK IT managers are spending more than 5 million hours per year searching for lost emails, according to a survey.

The wasted effort equates to more than £140m in staff costs, says the poll from e-Media, commissioned by email management specialist Mimecast.

Email is the most important communication method between businesses, but too often filtering systems are weeding out valid messages.

Sixty per cent of the survey’s 100 respondents said they had lost important emails. More than half check their mail quarantines daily and another 22 per cent check it a few times a week.

Source: vnunet.com

New research by Mesmo Consultancy report that over 50% of UK business users are self-inflicted ‘emailaholics’.

Over 50% of UK business users are unable to walk away from their emails, even when on leave or off sick, according to the results of Mesmo Consultancy’s latest research on email behaviour as revealed at Inbox/Outbox 2007.

More than half of the 415 respondents check emails when out of the office and 12% check over 5 times a day. When questioned on the main reason for keeping in touch with the office, 67% admitted that it is purely self-inflicted whilst only 20% log in because their office expects them to do so.

In a technology-enabled “always-on” society, where people are connected to their workplace 24/7, email addiction is rapidly becoming a widespread affliction, highlighted by the mushrooming number of internet sites and blogs suggesting rehab tips and techniques. As the Mesmo survey reported, only 17% of respondents give colleagues permission to deal with their emails in their absence and over 80% read every single email in their inbox.

“The role that email plays in office politics (CC and BCC being the most lethal weapons), the fear of missing something and being blamed for it, together with the amount of personal emails received at work addresses are surely accountable for the lack of delegation and obsessive inbox scanning behaviour, contributing directly to the addiction,” commented Dr. Monica Seeley, founder of Mesmo Consultancy. “Moreover, as the survey showed, the majority of users are expecting to receive a reply to a business email in less than 24 hours. And if a reply is sent immediately, that sets the expectation for the next round of communications, fostering a very reactive and rather unproductive way of working.”

Issues around work efficiency and productivity were even highlighted by the way in which the survey’s responses were collected. The research, conducted by email amongst 4000 UK business users with 66% of respondents at managerial/director level, attracted approximately half of the responses within the first hour of sending out the survey. This indicates that the majority of business users are willing to be distracted from the task in hand by emails landing in their inbox, breaking concentration with obvious loss of productivity as a consequence.
Source: PublicTechnology.net

A survey on the users perception on the effectiveness of anti-spam products was carried out by Brockmann’s & Company.  They surveyed 520 people working in IT, sales, marketing, finance, human resources and administration, or C-level executives.

The rate of customers who are not “very satisfied” is more than 70 percent for six of the eight types of anti-spam technologies. Commercial software filters, such as those produced by McAfee, Symantec and Trend Micro, fully satisfy just 22 percent of users, the report found. Filters that come with email clients, like those from Apple, IBM Lotus and Microsoft, fully satisfy only 21 percent of customers.

Satisfaction rates are similarly low for business-class email hosting providers, filtering appliances, and reputation systems known as “real-time black lists” from Commtouch, IronPort and Spamhaus.

The worst-performing technology appears to come from open source projects like SpamPal and SpamAssassin, which fully satisfy just 16 percent of users.

The most-satisfied customers use challenge-response vendors, which fully satisfied users 67 percent of the time.

Challenge-response tools allow messages from known senders without interruption, since virtually all spam comes from first-time senders. First-time senders are challenged with a reply email telling them to reply, click on a URL, or visit a website to complete delivery of the message.

“This procedure overcomes the weakness of spammers since spammers never monitor the reply-to accounts of their messages,” the Brockmann report said.

Hosted email filtering services such as Google-Postini, AppRiver, and MXLogic performed second best, as customers report being very satisfied 42 percent of the time. These services use the processing power of Internet data centres to scour enormous quantities of email and find suspicious messages, Brockmann said.

People get an average of 11 spam messages per day, accounting for 15 percent of all messages, Brockmann said. That’s after the work done by spam filters. Before filtering, probably 90 percent of email is spam, they say.

Source: Techworld.com