More than 50% of emails are deleted unread, according to a survey of UK business managers by email management provider Waterford Technologies. The inbox-clogger that sent managers fastest to the delete button was email newsletters (40%), followed by spam (32%), and internal spam sent by colleagues at 22%.
Even with the frenzied deleting of messages, three-quarters of respondents are still frustrated how quickly their inboxes fill up. The email glut also affected their ability to find important information. Some 55% of the managers said they spend 30 minutes a week looking for emails they had sent or received. That equates to an organization with 1,000 employees who earn an average 30,000 pounds ($61,547), losing 345,000 pounds ($707,662) a year through lost productivity. On top of that, there’s the cost of storing those emails.
One area adding to the storage burden is attachments. Following the obvious Word, Excel, and PowerPoint attachments, picture files, such as JPEGs and gifs are the most popular attachments people send, the survey found. These picture files are typically personal snaps taken by digital camera rather than anything to do with work.
