Managing an out of control email inbox is a task that nobody wants to do but, at some point in time, has set aside a few hours from their schedule to tackle it face-on. However, a clogged up inbox isn’t just an irritant for employees, it’s also a major risk and productivity drain for organisations.
An unmanaged inbox can quickly become clogged up to irretrievable levels. For example, the average office worker receives around 126 emails per day. Therefore, if an employee didn’t file any emails for a whole week, their inbox would contain 882 emails. Extend that to one month without filing and they’re looking at the tricky task of sorting through a mass of 3,906 emails. While an entire year of refusing to file emails, which isn’t uncommon, racks up a huge inbox of 45,990 messages. Across a business with lots of employees, that's an unmanageable amount.
It’s also to be expected that, in the process of filing, sorting, and moving those email messages into folders, something is going to go wrong. They might miss an important message, they could file an email into the wrong folder, or they could delete a message that didn’t seem important at the time but could have major ramifications further down the line.
Furthermore, the average user also sends 40 emails every day for business purposes, yet most people don’t file their sent emails and many simply delete them. That runs the risk of 280 emails per week and over 1,200 emails per month, which could contain useful information about clients and contractual agreements, being unfiled or deleted.
What’s in your inbox?
The reality is that a lot of the emails people receive on a daily basis aren’t urgent messages that require an immediate response. The message may be addressed to someone else on their team or is only sent for reference, so the employee doesn’t need to take any action. However, these are the kind of messages that people forget about and leave festering in their inbox, then it becomes impossible to find when they eventually need it.
Other emails in employees’ inboxes are likely to be contracts or client agreements that have been sent to a project manager and sit dormant or unopened in the user’s inbox. There may be scope changes, changes to work and attachments that also sit in their inbox unused but could be important further down the line of a project or job. Or, worse, vital to reproduce as evidence in court or during a dispute. They could also have HR documents, tickets they’ve raised with IT, and company-wide updates from senior leadership.
The vast majority of this information, from HR and IT documents to contracts and scope changes, needs to be stored securely. This is vital in case information is required for later reference or to confirm agreements and deadlines that were agreed. It’s, therefore, logical to make information easily discoverable as and when employees require access by taking control of email management. Good e-discovery abilities from better records management is vital in the digital age.
This means using software that guarantees all information shared by email is filed to the correct folder or server location, which makes it easily discoverable by all relevant parties across the wider team.
It’s also important to avoid the risk of human error with incorrect or inconsistent filing. This could result in important or sensitive information being hidden within an employee’s inbox, see wasted hours searching for emails, or data getting lost completely.
Discover the information you need
Until now, most employees have only had access to the information contained in their own email inboxes. But Mail Manager enables any employee to access all emails sent and received by their teams and across the business, providing they have the appropriate access and permission levels.
The solution's AI engine predicts where every email, both sent and received, should be filed and stores it in the most appropriate folder. Mail Manager removes reliance on staff having to manage their inboxes manually, stops them from storing emails in their own folders or on their desktops, and prevents people from deleting critical information by standardising filing activity across the business. This enhances compliance levels by ensuring all employees work to the same standards, file documents in the same way, and helps the business adhere to data regulations and ISO standards.
Furthermore, Mail Manager has developed a rapid Google-like search tool that helps users to quickly and easily find any email from any project. The search tool sorts through hundreds of thousands of emails, drills down by topic or emails that include attachments, and discovers the information that users need in a couple of seconds. This is particularly important in the event that an organisation faces a potential dispute or if an employee involved in an email exchange has left the business or is on leave.
Importantly, Mail Manager also ensures businesses can discover legacy information from projects or client work that have been completed and emails sent or received by staff that have moved on from the organisation. This ensures they are able to reproduce all correspondence across any project/job should they require it for litigation purposes, and protect themselves in the event of a legal dispute.
Discover how Mail Manager can help your staff to clean up their inboxes and practice better email management by trying it out for yourself below.
