One trick that can help reduce the sheer volume of messages is to help employees balance between "push" and "pull" style communication. E-mail is a push mechanism—it goes out to everyone on the list, even those who might not be interested. Some information is better posted on the corporate intranet—as it would be with an old-fashioned physical bulletin board—where concerned employees can pull the information on an as-needed basis.

Most companies store e-mail messages on a central server, back them up on tape and save them for a certain amount of time. Allegiance Telecom retains its employees’ e-mail messages for 90 days as a matter of policy. "We looked at the business needs and weighed those against storage costs," Naramore says. From the disaster-recovery standpoint, Naramore recommends using a mail server such as iPlanet that allows you to recover mailbox-by-mailbox. His e-mail system currently uses Microsoft Exchange, which does not have that capability. The one time he had to recover e-mail from the backup (because of a corrupt mail store), it took 18 hours, an "unacceptable" amount of time.

How long you retain e-mail depends on what your business needs the information for, but there is another significant aspect in storage decisions: legal implications. The longer you store e-mail, the longer it may be subpoenaed by a court. If you back up messages forever, adding and adding to the mail archives or deleting only when you run out of room, you will be responsible for handing over all the stored messages in the case of litigation.

The problem here—beyond the hassle of producing all the e-mail—is that e-mail more often yields incriminating rather than exculpatory evidence. (The damning e-mail messages brought to light in the Microsoft antitrust trial are just such an example.) "E-mail preserves bad things more often than good things," Everett-Church says. "My advice is to keep as little information as possible for your business needs." You might reasonably retain messages for a month to three months. Much more than that and you’ll face increasing storage costs—not to mention greater legal risk.

Tools that Can Help

While people and policy issues are paramount, the good news is that software tools offer some help in managing e-mail. Filtering is the de rigueur way to avoid a lot of the spam and viruses floating around in cyberspace. Tools such as MineSweeper and Brightmail filter out the executable file attachments that often contain viruses as well as potential spam, both by objectionable content (for example, "Work at home!") and by segregating messages from known "spam houses." Feliu of Visto uses Brightmail but prefers to err on the generous side: He filters known spam content into a specific folder where employees can view it if they have some reason to do so (such as if they are looking for a lost message). Says Feliu, "One person’s spam is another person’s gold."