Email continues to grow at an additional 20 percent a year; every organization with at least a handful of servers faces an Email traffic nightmare. It has already become a critical element not only for simple communication, but as a building block for group collaboration and organizational knowledge management.

Email mailboxes contain business critical data right alongside junk and threatening malware, spyware or viruses. Most IT organizations routinely measure every second of mainframe CPU usage or track SAP transaction performance but never applied equivalent measurements to Email. As a result, nobody knows:

� Where problems lie� Who has left the company impacting Email� What Emails to keep and for how long� Who their big users and abusers of Email are� How many unnecessary Emails are actually overloading their network� When and where more capacity (server, disk, WAN) will be needed

You can’t manage what you aren’t measuring applies as much to Email as it does to every other aspect of business. The first step in controlling Email use and preventing it from spiraling out of control is Email measurement and analysis. Without that, a manager simply is stumbling around in the dark, unlikely to find the Email abusers who are responsible for the bulk of the problems.

Email measurement enables an organization to identify Email usage and analyze traffic patterns for purposes of cost control and performance optimization. Email management helps ensure Email and continually delivers expected service while also meeting regulatory compliance needs. All the while, Email management can reveal risky Email usage patterns and aid in planning major IT projects like server consolidation, topology redesigns, capacity planning, and more.

Key to Controlling Email

The Email problem is controllable through policy-based management. Well implemented and enforced policies enable organizations to:

• Control Email growth
• Manage the cost
• Ensure users are using the right collaborative platform for the right task

Managers can use policies to curtail excessive Email usage. For example, policies can discourage the automatic use of REPLY ALL or restrict the use of Email distribution lists steps that can reduce Email volume without impacting Email effectiveness.

Policies are also essential when organizations want to capture the full savings from a server consolidation project. In this case, policies let organizations control excessive Email usage and rein in the few Email abusers that significantly drive up bandwidth costs which are greatly magnified in a consolidated environment.

Changing how Email is used even slightly can result in marked user productivity changes; 80% of users check Email a few times every hour!

In the same way, policies help with:

• Restoring or maintaining Email performance
• Reducing Email overload that people experience when they are copied unnecessarily on messages
• Restore the productivity once associated with Email

While 80% of users check Email a few times each hour, 65% of recipients not only check but also open new Email as soon as it arrives. If you reduce Email volume even a little bit not only will your infrastructure benefit as critical Email reaches its destination faster but users will be interrupted fewer times and can concentrate on truly important Email.

Creating Effective Email Policies

Without implementing and enforcing appropriate policies, organizations have no choice but to constantly dedicate additional capacity and resources to Email just to keep up with the incessant increases in Email volume.

But organizations need the right policies to bring their Email under control. The key is to implement policies that are tailored expressly for each organizations Email issues and needs. Generic policies won’t do.

For instance, Research reports 60% of organizations enforce mailbox size quotas, but at the same time, 50% of Email users regularly bump up against their quotas. Implementing arbitrary mailbox quotas simply undermines worker productivity as user’s waste time actively managing their mailboxes instead of doing work.

Lesson learned; implementing arbitrary policies is not the answer. They artificially constrain users and often fail to have the desired effect. What organizations need are rules specifically tailored to the organizations unique Email usage patterns. Only then will the resulting policies achieve the desired outcome while avoiding counterproductive behavior. Effective Email policies start with the identification of the sources of unnecessarily high Email volumes.

Once you have identified the sources of the excessive volume, you can define appropriate policies to control them. To be effective, senior management needs to drive Email policy development and fully support its enforcement.

Measurements, for example, can reveal if there is excessive use of Email distribution lists or whether
users routinely reply to all rather than just the sender. More importantly, every organization has its

heavy hitters that small handful of users who create inordinate amounts of mail traffic. Research has shown that 50% of Email traffic is typically caused by a small fraction of users, usually less than 1 %.

Once you have identified the sources of the excessive volume, you can define appropriate policies to control them. When you identify which Email usage behaviors are undesirable and which users are clearly misusing or abusing Email, these users can be controlled through policies and educated to alter their Email practices. As previously noted, Email usage patterns are unique to each organization. Therefore, each organization requires policies that are tailored to their specific environment.

IT Managers should define appropriate policies targeted to the actual behaviors of their organizations Email users. Only in this way can companies create policies to produce desired behaviors or to discourage unwanted behaviors. This is a straightforward 3-step process:

1. Capture and analyze Email usage and traffic metrics2. Identify patterns of chronic traffic abuse and individuals who are the worst Email abusers3. Define and implement responsible-use policies that encourage desired behavior and discourage unwanted behavior4. To be effective, senior management needs to drive Email policy development and fully support its enforcement.

Enforcing Mail Policies

The best Email policies in the world will not help you control Email if you fail to enforce them. Responsible-use policies without enforcement are like highway speed limits without speed traps and ticketing. Very quickly, users will realize this and revert to their original behavior.

Effective policy enforcement requires ongoing Email measurement, monitoring, and automatic policing. As a manager, you need to know when your policies are not having the expected impact. Analysis and investigation will quickly reveal whether the policies are being ignored, avoided, circumvented, or otherwise undermined and by whom.

Ongoing, automated measurement is the Email equivalent of the radar gun used on the highway to enforce speed limits. Automated measurement and remediation is necessary to ensure that Email continually flows smoothly and at minimum cost. Aut
omated Email analysis of both the Email envelope as well as the Email content coupled with an automated workflow process to resolve policy violations will further assist your organization in ensuring that users comply with policies.

Management also needs to conduct targeted education for the biggest users with the goal of proactively altering their Email usage patterns. In addition, management should wherever appropriate, direct these users to alternative collaboration and communication technologies, such as SharePoint, Notes discussion databases, IM, or blogs.

Finally, Email management reporting, typically provided through an executive portal, ensures that management stays abreast of the organizations highly dynamic Email environment, and can deal with lapses or policy tunings in a timely fashion.