Commentary

Good Intentions Notwithstanding, Half of Office Email Not Work Related

Good Intentions Notwithstanding, Half of Office Email Not Work Related

A recently released study conducted in September, entitled “Corporate Email User Habits,” by Mirapoint and the Radicati Group, found that that 23 percent of all messages in respondent’s corporate mailboxes are personal in nature. And, the report noted, that along with the 33% of corporate email that is spam, more than half of corporate email messages are not work related.

Marcel Nienhuis, market analyst at the Radicati Group, said “These results indicate that personal use of corporate email may be higher than employers expect, representing a potentially significant loss in productivity.”

The report also revealed that 72 percent of respondents forward jokes, photos, video clips, and other non- work related messages via corporate email to co-workers.  Only 28 percent of respondents claim to “never” misuse corporate email in this manner.  Moreover, 12 percent of users acknowledge sharing music files via corporate email, violating copyright laws, occupying server storage and eating large amounts of bandwidth.

A fourth of the 97 percent of respondents who have a personal email account admitted to regularly forwarding company email messages to personal accounts, and 62 percent of respondents send business email from their personal email accounts. Reasons for this, says the report writer, may be as innocuous as staying on the job during an email outage or as nefarious as avoiding a paper trail with their corporate email account. 

“Most employees do not mean harm when using business email,” said Bethany Mayer, chief marketing officer at Mirapoint. “Despite good intentions, employees may unwittingly expose sensitive company information via working with their personal email, underscoring the need for greater outbound email filtering and policy enforcement.”  

For more information, download the complete release.

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