Everybody has heard of the 80/20 rule, also called the Pareto principle, which states that in many cases, business and otherwise, 80% of the effects come only from 20% of causes. Email is no exception - however, the ratio is far more extreme.

Our analysis of large messaging environments over many years has revealed that in most companies 80% of the corporate messaging resources are being consumed by only about 1% of all employees.

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Numerous news wires and blogs reported a serious email problem at the Department of Homeland Security yesterday that resulted in a tidal wave of emails between about 7,500 department employees and external security professionals; said to have generated over 2 million email messages on Wednesday alone.

“The Department of Homeland Security self-inflicted what one observer called a mini distributed denial of service, with a reported mass of more than 2.2 million messages stuffing the inboxes of the nation’s security experts.”

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Many companies are starting to look at ways to either reduce or slow down the ever increasing spending on their messaging infrastructure. Not only has the amount of email traffic grown exponentially in recent years, new regulatory retention requirements for electronic communications are adding huge additional expense to IT operations and infrastructure budgets.

So how do you trim the fat? – Start looking for bacn bits.

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One of the few controls that mail administrators have at their disposal to curb the ever-increasing email volume traversing their networks is the maximum message size limit. Most companies deploy one size limit for their internal network and another for messages send to the Internet. At first glance, the reason for imposing size limits seems obvious enough. Who would want their mail server and network to come to a crawl or worse crash because a careless employee had sent a 600MB wmv file via email of junior taking his first steps. Naturally, most firms have put draconian restrictions in place, in many cases somewhere around 5-10MB for external and 10-20MB for internal messages.

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Email administrators at most companies are struggling to keep up with the ever-increasing storage demands of email. A frequently raised question is: What is the main force driving the consistent increase in email traffic?

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With today’s post I am starting a repeat series of “from the trenches” reports. Over the years, I have come across numerous examples of so-called “aha-moments” that I think are worth sharing.

When analyzing corporate messaging systems you can observe many consistent trends, but every now and then, you will notice a peculiar anomaly. Those are the times when in the middle of a presentation a person in the back of the room stands up and proclaims: “I told you that something strange was going on, but nobody would listen to me.” However, these stories do not just make good anecdotes they make you think and wonder if something like this might be happening in your corporate messaging environment as well, potentially costing your company unnecessary time and money.

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