How Much Of Your Work Email Is Work Related?
from the good-question dept
While we're always skeptical of studies published by security firms trying to sell something, a new report says that 25% of email is personal in nature, which they then combine with studies that say 33% of work email is spam, and conclude that more than half of corporate email is not actually work related. Of course, the real question is whether or not that's a problem at all? People handling some (within reason) personal emails work shouldn't be a problem -- and spam is a problem that can be dealt with some good filters. So, as long as most people can still handle their email loads, is it really a problem that so much email isn't work related?
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Easy for me to calculate
- The mail server at work, and
- GMail.
The reason for this is practical. I have no personal control over the mail server at work, so nothing I send out from my work email address is personal. Since most of my work email is within work itself (email to a colleague or a group of employees), this email address doesn't even get spammed.For those rare times that I need to send messages outside work, such as sending a query to my wife ("what will we have for dinner?"), I use GMail. GMail offers me 2+ Gb storage, if I need it, and all my friends know that sending me email to that address will get me whether I'm at work or at home. There are numerous GMail notifiers that work on Windows, Linux, OS X, so that I am aware whenever something enters my mailbox no matter what platform I'm using (Windows at work, OS X at home, very occasionally Linux).
Now, I can look at my GMail activity (All messages) and see that I send out one or two a day during work hours. By the same token, I send out a dozen or so at work. This means that at most, 15% of my emails when at work is personal.
Fortunately, my employer has a lenient policy on web use (feel free to read Slashdot, NY Times, Wired, etc. as long as you manage to get your REAL work done on time), so using GMail isn't forbidden. Other companies may have different policies, of course.
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Re: Easy for me to calculate
Anyway, about 95% of my work e-mail is work related... the extra 1/20 being e-mails coworkers send me that arent exactly work. I send about 10 e-mails a day on my work account and 2 Gmails each day.... but I receive about 40 e-mails at work and about 5 at Gmail.... so I don't know how you'd want to calculate it.
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No Subject Given
We don't really harp on users too much unless they are abusing it. It would take up too much of our time to try and police it anyway. Want to send a quick note to Grandma? Fine. Just don't start using it as your Ebay email address and selling all sorts of crap.
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Re: No Subject Given
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that sounds about right
I'll read my personal e-mail but not respond unless I feel its really urgent and can't wait a few hours till lunch break or when I get home.
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No personal email on work server
I find this is the best way to manage email and to isolate spam.
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Money for nothing and my chicks for free
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Friendly SPAM
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Re: No Subject Given
How can people function without having *all* the email they have ever recieved in an easily searchable place (their email account).
10M of space costs how much nowadays? Something like 3 tenths of a cent I think. How much are you costing the company by making people decide what to keep, saving it off to somewhere else, or inventing their own organization system?
Having all of your historical email available is invaluable. Saving a few cents of storage space is stupid.
And for the record, it is generally the emails from within the company that are large (attached documents). Personal emails will just have an embedded link. (Yes, company emails should just have an embedded link to the document, but nobody ever does it).
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