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Email management

Email is now an essential business communication tool and is also widely used for personal 

use. Billions of messages are sent each day. Four main controls need to be considered to 

reduce the amount of time effectively wasted by staff reading email by minimising the vol-

ume of:

1 

Spam (unsolicited email).

2 

Internal business email.

3 

External business email.

4 

Personal email (friends and family).

Despite the potential time loss through email misuse an AMA (2003) survey suggested 

that only 34% of employers had a written email retention and deletion policy in place. 

Furthermore, there are issues of legal liability about what employees say in their email 

which also need to be considered. We will look at the risk and controls of each email risk 

in turn.