Jokes inflame 'e-mail epidemic'

Over 30 billion e-mails are sent daily around the world

The next time you send a joke e-mail to your work colleagues, think about how much it is costing your employer.

An "e-mail epidemic" is worrying company technical chiefs who have to store the volumes of daily messages, a survey by Hitachi has found.

A quarter of technical chiefs believe that fun, gossipy e-mails are eating into the costs of storing messages.

The problem could worsen as the number of e-mails sent daily is set to soar to from 31 billion to 35 billion by 2005.

Critical messages

"Since most companies are reluctant to place draconian e-mail restrictions on their staff, they need to look at ways of storing e-mail content more efficiently," said Hitachi's Nick Howe.

One in 10 technical directors said e-mail storage accounted for up to 40% of their data storage costs.

But this could be helped if companies were better at sorting out which data needs to be kept and which can be erased.

Part of our culture these days is that we are more likely to send e-mail than pick up a phone Tony Reid, Hitachi

Information overload or information pollution is also a big problem for computer networks and human workers.

E-mail contributes to a big chunk of the daily data traffic which networks carry. Many organisations are obliged to keep back-ups of data like e-mail communication for a certain amount of time.

But the more data that is generated, the more difficult it is to back up, Hitachi's Tony Reid told BBC News Online.

"E-mail is very much a critical business application now," he said.

"Part of our culture these days is that we are more likely to send e-mail than pick up a phone. In some respects, it is sad, but it is often more efficient to do it that way.

"In a lot of organisations, if e-mail is not available, then workers stop working."

This does not just include the one-word e-mail responses that are relevant to work.

There is, of course, a huge amount of viral e-mail jokes, office gossip messages which all contribute to the growing mountain of data that has to be kept somewhere.

Out of 630 technical chiefs Hitachi spoke to from around the world, most said keeping the daily deluge eats up 20% of the cost of their storage.

Changing regulations in North America dictating how documents like e-mails are stored, in what format and for how long, are set to affect European businesses in the coming year, said Mr Reid, so companies need to sort and store e-mails intelligently.

The problem could get even more serious if the predictions for global daily e-mails sent flying across computer networks are true.

Currently, it is estimated about 31 billion e-mail messages are sent daily.