Employees need help managing e-mail.

• Author: Swartz, Nikki
• Position: UP FRONT

Today, it's taking longer for most employees to manage their e-mail--and they aren't doing such a good job of it. For example, a recent survey found that employees are failing to properly archive e-mails because they are too busy or don't know how to do so. That's not entirely their fault--companies are doing a bad job implementing e-mail policies and training their employees in this regard.

According to the survey commissioned by GFT Inboxx, a unified archiving supplier, more than 75 percent of those polled said they received no guidance on e-mail storage requirements and methods, and more than one-third said their company has no e-mail policy in place.

One-third of the 260 workers interviewed said they had lost important electronic records and never recovered them. More than half said e-mail archiving is too time-consuming, and 30 percent find it "complicated" or "unreliable."

Some 41 percent said they leave files attached to e-mails forever, and only half said they have an enforced limit on the storage space for their messages, More than 25 percent said they save the files to the company system, while 28 percent save them to their hard drive.

Juergen Obermann, chief executive at GFT Inboxx, said, "These results suggest one of two things: that...