The real cost
Email filing software costs a fraction of what poor email management is already costing your firm. Most AEC businesses never calculate the loss because it's spread across the business in small increments: hours searching, days reconstructing timelines, weeks onboarding people to projects nobody filed the correspondence for. When you add it up, the numbers are significant.
How much does poor email management cost per employee?
We calculated that businesses can save the average employee 3 hours per week by getting email filing right. At the baseline of £15 an hour, that's £180 per month per employee. For AEC professionals billing at £75 an hour or more, the real figure is closer to £900 per month - over £10,000 a year per person in recovered time.
Across a team of 50 engineers: half a million pounds a year. That's before a single dispute.
Brian Falconer at Severud Associates - the New York structural engineering firm behind Moynihan Station and the WTC Path Station - put it simply:
"Just archiving and managing my emails was taking me over an hour a day."
An hour a day from a senior engineer whose billable time far exceeds the cost of Ideagen Mail Manager.
What is one prevented dispute actually worth?
The 2025 Arcadis Global Construction Disputes Report found the average US construction dispute hit $60.1 million, with resolution taking 12.5 months. You don't need to prevent a $60 million dispute to justify email management. You need to prevent one misunderstanding that escalates because nobody can find the email trail.
Dave Wesemann, President & CEO of Spectrum Engineers described the same dynamic on the billion-dollar Utah State Prison project:
"There's been more than one occasion where there's been a dispute over who said what and who told who to do what. I was able to go into our Mail Manager filing system for that project and searching tens of thousands of emails, immediately being able to find that smoking email that put the dispute to rest."
What does a 20:1 return on email management look like?
After Severud rolled out Mail Manager, Falconer calculated that the time he personally saves - over an hour a day at senior engineer rates - covers the license cost for 20 users:
"It pays for itself. I probably pay for 20."
One person's time savings covering 20 licenses. Senior staff get the most email, save the most time, and their time is worth the most. That's where the return concentrates.
Kenny Thurston, Manager of Technology Experience at DIALOG, put it in broader terms: "People spend almost a quarter of the time minimum trying to find information. Mail Manager drastically reduces the amount of time to find an important email, especially if a decision was made." A quarter of project time recovered across an entire firm - that's not a marginal gain.
Ideagen Mail Manager supports over 50,000 users across 2500+ businesses worldwide.
