"You must confront the employee and deal with it," says Feliu, who once ran the e-mail system for the United States Postal Service’s 200,000 employees in the northeastern United States. If it’s a first offense and the person shows remorse, a warning might be enough. If the actions continue after that, dismissal may be necessary. Failing to deal with the issue head-on could ultimately be construed as the corporation tolerating the behavior—and that could mean big bucks in court in addition to workplace disruption.

Training, Training and More Training

Training employees on e-mail policies is standard procedure for many companies, but training that stops there is inadequate. Employees also need instruction in e-mail etiquette, including how to recognize spam, scams and urban legends.

A common occurrence: One person sends out a message to everyone in the corporate address book offering free Dodgers tickets—and then someone replies to everyone on the list. Odson has seen this carried to absurd lengths. "Someone will send a message to the network, ’Don’t open this file.’ Then someone replies to the whole group, ’You’re right, don’t open that file.’ I have seen it get to that point." Odson recommends that employees "BCC" the recipients when sending messages to the whole company. That way, recipients cannot reply back to the entire group.

Some of the most commonly forwarded e-mails are hoaxes. Employees sometimes flood corporate networks with forwarded messages in an effort to help sick children or win free vacations, despite the fact that the majority of those messages are already well-known urban legends. Directing employees to check such missives against a reputable site such as www.scambusters.com can help reduce such distractions.

At Odson’s firm, every new hire undergoes a half day of training devoted to e-mail. The managers can’t get enough e-mail training for their direct reports, Odson says, because they have seen the bloodbaths that can result from inappropriate use of e-mail.

Controlling the Flood

E-mail usage just keeps going up. At big companies, the sheer volume of daily messaging can become daunting. At $5.8 billion printing giant R.R. Donnelley & Sons, for example, more than 7 million messages flow through the system each month, according to Gary Sutula, senior vice president and CIO. And even at smaller companies, CIOs must consider not only the cost of network usage and physical storage created by the messaging flood but also some possible legal ramifications surrounding stored e-mail.

At Allegiance Telecom, Naramore stores 90 days’ worth of e-mail for roughly 4,000 employees, which eats up 400 gigabytes of storage space. If your company is a startup or is relatively small, you might not have felt the need yet to limit the size of employee mailboxes—but you will. Most midsize and large companies limit individual inboxes to sizes between 15MB and a generous 150MB. A more radical possibility: cutting off employee access to some or (in extreme cases) all e-mail distribution lists. "You start out with no constraints, but they soon become necessary. Do you really want someone to be able to post software practice reminders to the whole company?" asks Feliu.