35% of corporate e-mail non-work related. (Internet Focus).

A customer research survey by email management software vendor, Waterford Technologies, has found that at least 35% of email within organisations is non-work related. The research demonstrates that most companies are failing to enforce an `Acceptable Usage Policy' for email and that `perimeter software', such as content filtering and blocking technology, is failing to provide complete protection against email abuse because it often does not track internal mail.

The research findings were compiled using Waterford Technologies' MailMeter software, which provides business reports on subject headers, email attachment types and the, domain names that emails are being sent to and received from.

The survey of 30 customers found that four of the top 10 Domain Names that employees were communicating with, were free Internet Service Providers rather than business addresses, with 40% of customers having Hotmail.com as the No. 1 Domain Name that they send to or receive email from. Internal email mis-use was also a major problem with the top Chatting Pairs within companies exchanging an average of 61 emails per day.

The survey also highlighted the fact that organisations are at risk from Corporate Domain Names that appear to be genuine business emails. All companies had an average of three Corporate Domain Names in their top 10 list where non-work related email, was either being either sent to or received from. Three of the top five attachment types being sent and received within companies were likely to be non-business related.

Another key finding was that many organisations are not taking the necessary security procedures to safeguard themselves against email abuse. Those companies that were already using `perimeter software such as content filtering and blocking tools were surprised to learn that `JPEG' was still on average the No.3 Attachment type being sent or received by their employees, which highlights that these attachments were being circulated internally. Another possible cause for this high volume of `JPEG' files could be that employees are managing to find work-arounds in order to beat content filtering and blocking software.

It is also uncommon for content filtering and blocking tools to police internal email usage because of the overheads this places on the system, which in turn means that many employees are able to exchange inappropriate emails internally throughout the working day knowing they will not be caught. Email storage and bandwidth consumption were also common problems for companies. On average, the oldest emails that were stored on email servers were five years old, whilst the average number of attachment types that were stored within `Sent Items' and `Deleted Items' folders was nearly 300 attachments per user.

www.waterfordtechnologies.co.uk