Survey: e-mail hampers productivity.

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Businesses that want more productive employees should improve their e-mail systems.

According to a recent survey of 2,400 employed U.S. adults conducted by Harris Interactive, 59 percent of those who use e-mail at work admitted to wasting a lot of time searching for lost e-mail, while 31 percent said they have had to re-write or re-construct these "lost" e-mails. More than one-fourth--28 percent--said the volume of e-mail they receive causes them to fall behind in their work.

As reliance on e-mail as a business tool has grown, so has the need for new and better ways to search through, store, and manage it. But, according to Harris, many businesses are still relying on basic e-mail tools to cope with the influx of e-mail data.

"Without the proper search and storage tools, e-mail can actually reduce productivity levels. Companies are wasting huge amounts of their employees' time just sorting through, filing, and saving e-mail for future use," said Paul Chen, chief executive officer of Fortiva.

It's not just business e-mail that can have an impact on productivity levels, the survey found. With 61 percent of e-mail users at work also using work e-mail for personal reasons, chances are that businesses are also losing employee time to personal correspondence. This personal e-mail use also can have an impact on corporate e-mail storage resources.

According to IDC estimates, the volume of business e-mail sent annually worldwide will exceed 3.5 exabytes in 2006--more than doubling the amount sent over the past two years (1 exabyte = 1 thousand petabytes = 1 million terabytes = 1 billion gigabytes).

Many organizations are turning to e-mail archiving to solve these problems. It enables employees to easily access their own e-mail archives, including deleted e-mail, from their corporate mailbox. This feature...