The EMAIL Time Bomb

By using email, companies face several threats. These range from legal threats to network congestion issues:

Legal liability
In most cases the employer is responsible for all information transmitted from their systems. As a result, inappropriate emails often result in multi-million dollar penalties. In the US, Chevron settled a case filed by four female employees for $2.2 million. The employees alleged that sexually harassing emails sent through the company email system caused a threatening work environment. One of the sexually offensive messages was a ‘joke’ sheet titled ‘25 reasons why beer is better than women’. A company can also be liable if one of its employees sends an email containing a virus.

Confidentiality breaches
Most confidentiality breaches occur from employees within the company. These breaches can be accidental, for instance by selecting a wrong contact in the To: field. However, confidentiality breaches can also be intentional, as Borland International Inc. experienced first hand: A Borland employee used the company’s email system to send out confidential information to competitor Symantec, his new employer. The trade secrets included product design specifications, sales data and information regarding a prospective contract for which both companies were competing. The employee and recipient were both charged with trade secret theft.

Damage to Reputation 
Simply put, the content of a corporate emails reflects on the business. A badly written email, or an email containing unprofessional remarks will cause the recipient to have a bad impression of the company the sender is representing.

Lost productivity
Lost productivity due to inappropriate use of a company’s email system is becoming a growing area of concern.  A recent study by the Gartner Group found that unproductive internal emails take up 30 percent of employees’ time spent reading email. It concluded that banning email which contains gossip, jokes, and other time-wasting content would save a considerable amount of employees’ time.

Network congestion & down time
Spam and personal (mis) use of email can cause a company’s email system to waste valuable bandwidth resources, not to mention employees’ time. A Gartner Group study held under 13,000 email users, found that 90 percent receive spam at least once a week, and almost 50 percent get spammed more than 6 times a week. Personal emails cause network congestion since they are not only unnecessary, but tend to be mailed to a large list of recipients and often include large attachments such as mp3, executable or video files that users do not zip. Viruses are another important area of concern. If a virus hits the company system this can cause network congestion or even down time.

Email retrieval on court order
Email records are increasingly used in lawsuits since they tend to contain important evidence. For instance, if your company is faced with a wrongful termination lawsuit, chances are that you will be ordered to search all company emails for messages relating to that person. This is usually not just a matter of a quick keyword search. The retrieval often involves restoring thousands of emails on servers and result in slow and painful searches. Worse still, the court could even confiscate your computers as evidence.