Ensure anti‑ virus software and blocking is effective. Email viruses are increasingly
perpetrated by spammers since they are a method of harvesting email addresses. Virus
protection needs to be updated daily.
2 Minimising internal business email
The ease and low cost of sending emails to a distribution list or copying people in on a mes-
sage can lead to each person in an organisation receiving many messages each day from
colleagues within the organisation. This problem tends to be worse in large organisations,
simply because each individual has a larger address book of colleagues. A press release from
the British Computer Society summarising research conducted by the Henley Management
College in 2002 suggested that a lot of time is wasted by managers when processing irrelevant
emails:
●
Of seven common management tasks, meetings took up 2.8 hours on average, dealing
with email came second with an average of 1.7 hours and accessing information from the
Internet accounted for a further 0.75 hour.
●
Respondents reported receiving on average 52 emails per day while 7% received 100 emails
per day or more.
●
Managers reported that less than half of emails (42%) warranted a response, 35% were
read for information only and nearly a quarter were deleted immediately. On average
only 30% of emails were classified as essential, 37% as important and 33% as irrelevant or
unnecessary.
●
Despite the reservations about the quality and volume of emails received, the majority of
respondents (81%) regarded email as the communications technology which has had the
most positive impact on the way they carried out their job, alongside the Internet and the
mobile phone.
To overcome this type of business email overuse, companies are starting to develop email
policies which explain best practice. For example, Chaffey and Wood (2005) devised these
guidelines:
●
Only send the email to employees who must be informed or who must act upon it.
●
Banning certain types of email, such as the classic ‘email to the person who sits next to
you’ or individuals in the same office.
●
Avoid ‘flaming’ – these are aggressive emails which often put voice to feelings that
wouldn’t be said face-to-face. If you receive an annoying email it is best to wait 10 minutes
to cool down rather than ‘flaming’ the sender.
●
Avoid ‘trolls’ – these are a species of email closely related to flame mails. They are postings
to a newsgroup deliberately posted to ‘wind up’ the recipient.
●
Combine items from separate emails during the day or week into a single email for the
day/week.
●
Write clear subject lines.
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