Inbox Zero: Plotting a Route to Less Stress

I was intrigued to see that someone named the fourth week in January, 'Clean Out Your Inbox Week'. This was an initiative aimed at helping employees take control of their inbox and reduce email overload. Ever expanding inboxes are something we all have to deal with at work and home, and many people struggle to manage their inbox effectively…often cited as a major cause of workplace stress.

From our point of view, this is not just an issue for individuals but also a situation impacting corporates and their IT departments. As email inboxes get bigger and data storage costs rise, more and more management resources become sucked into looking after this growing email infrastructure and its mass of unstructured data.

But happily there are solutions to these problems.

Even the most hardened hoarder of emails can be helped. Firstly, if your organization uses a cloud email security service like Mimecast you can significantly cut the spam cluttering inboxes and clogging up costly data storage on the network. The vast majority of email that hits your network is unwanted spam (estimates vary in excess of 70%) and our service stops this even reaching your organization. If you don’t do this, checking and filtering this email wastes valuable IT time and resources unnecessarily.

Once you’re sure what’s in the inbox is ‘real’, next stop is effective filing and archiving.  The problem is that for many people storing their emails into an archive is a concern – they are sending the email and its attachments off to a dusty, never to be seen again archive out of their control. Once it’s there, it’s simply too difficult to recover– so these emails stay languishing in the inbox and squatting on the enterprise’s network just in case they need them.

With a cloud archive service like Mimecast’s, we help you get round that problem. The archive is bottomless and sits securely in the cloud, and off the corporate network. So IT managers can reduce their storage burden. For the user, the archive is interactive – they can search, access and re-use all their archived emails forever safe in the knowledge it’s being securely and safely stored indefinitely if they want. When we show IT managers and their users this, we see a major shift in attitude about the archive. The concern about using them proactively to help manage the burden on their inbox goes away. If this archive is then paired with end user productivity tools like our mobile apps, the archive can become invaluable – available to users where and when they want, on their device of choice.

So you can have the best of both worlds. A zero mail inbox and easy, searchable access to every mail you ever received or sent if that is what you want or need. This will be good news to those emailers who made a New Year resolution to finally get off their IT manager’s naughty list.