Naramore is CIO of Allegiance Telecom, a competitive local exchange carrier in Dallas. In fact, Allegiance has a relatively stringent approach to enforcing its corporate e-mail usage policy: employees must agree to the policy’s terms and conditions each and every time they log on to the e-mail system. The policy includes a prominent directive: Don’t open unexpected attachments. But that wasn’t enough to stop several of the $285 million company’s employees from opening the attachment with the Love Bug virus in May 2000. The virus slipped through Allegiance’s virus-defense systems. Fortunately, an alert network administrator noted the virus-prompted surge of messages and froze all incoming mail, allowing the company to contain the virus within an hour.

Naramore’s company got only a superficial bite from the Love Bug (which cost U.S. businesses an estimated total of $10 billion), but viruses are just the beginning of a laundry list of woes that accompany the blessings of e-mail communication. The popularity of e-mail creates bandwidth challenges—Allegiance’s system traffic, for example, jumped from 200,000 messages per month last year to 500,000 per month this year. Archiving those missives creates storage issues. And mixed in with all the business-related e-mail is the usual flood of spam, scams, dancing animated babies, sexist jokes and even pornographic images. Some companies have discovered the hard way that those messages are financial, ethical and legal land mines. Chevron, for example, paid $2.2 million to settle a suit brought by a female employee protesting an e-mail circulated in the company that listed 25 reasons why beer is better than a woman.

"It’s absolutely astonishing, the things people will put in e-mail," says Joe Feliu, CIO and vice president of operations for Mountain View, Calif.-based Visto, a software and services vendor for remote access to messaging systems.

E-mail is a seemingly mundane issue but one that demands careful attention from the CIO. The key realization is that e-mail management is principally about people management. In this article, CIOs share their tips for keeping e-mail under control.

Start with the Policy

Your first line of defense against e-mail troubles is a solid e-mail usage policy, regularly communicated and consistently enforced. Unfortunately, no single e-mail policy works for all companies. Each CIO must sort through corporate culture and arrive at a policy that is within bounds and workable. The undertaking is usually done in conjunction with the general counsel (or other legal adviser) and the human resources department. (For sample policies, go to www.cio.com/printlinks.) Once it is set, the e-mail usage policy should become part of the company’s HR policies, right there in the employee handbook for all to see.