A01 chaf6542 06 se fm indd

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.