Most users are oblivious to the email overload issue. They use email as a filing system for important documents and rely on IT to maintain these ever-growing repositories. Many enterprises are forced to confront the email overload issue only when the size of the user's mail boxes are so bloated that they impact the performance and physical storage of the email system. To combat this problem, many enterprises have attempted to add more resources to the mail system, which is the standard response to the burden of email growth. Simply adding more resources can be expensive, not just in terms of hardware, software, and storage, but also in terms of increase administrative requirements. And the primary growth issue has still not been addressed. To address the issue of ever-increasing email files, IT managers will often use one or more methods, such as implementing email policies with quotas or email size limits, instituting mail archiving, or use of compression tools. Each of these methods might provide some relief, but often at the expense of end-user productivity. This tactic also forces users to copy their email onto their local desktop thus removing them from central backups and deletion. This could present a huge legal liability for enterprises in today's compliance and regulatory environment.

The solution for IT is first to define not only an email retention policy for the enterprise. Retention policy should also include when the email should be deleted based on business requirements. Second, find a solution that consolidates the duplicate messages within the email to find immediate relief to the email servers. Third, to provide an active email archive solution that has minimal user impact, with substantial email storage reduction and yet is flexible enough to conform to enterprises' email retention and deletion policy.

Exivity's Atomic "single instance" store solution solves the duplicated email associated with email overload. The primary cause of large mail files is attachments. Attachments typically comprise over 80% of total email storage. Large files being transmitted as email attachments consumed tremendous bandwidth and storage resources. The average attachment size has increased by over 50% in the past three years, due to the ease of creating very large presentations, graphics, video and audio files. Despite best efforts of IT to facilitate the distribution of such content through other methods, such as document repositories and other collaboration tools, end users continue to find email to be the easiest, most reliable delivery, and storage, mechanism.

This is where attachment management comes in. By finding a way to intelligently address the root of the problem - attachment proliferation and storage - IT can finally begin to control the situation. Simply by stripping attachments from all messages stored in end-user mail files, IT can achieve rapid reductions in overall email storage.

Exivity's AtomicEMT ROI analysis tool, when run against a Domino mail server, will measure the potential savings both in terms of reduction of individual mail files, as well as net savings to be achieved using Exivity's many-to-one attachment consolidation method. As AtomicEMT moves through one mail file after another, and is able to consolidate 5, 10, 20, even hundreds of copies of common files stored in multiple mail files to a "single instance" mail store databases, the attachments in the Domino mail servers are replaced with a simple Notes doc_link. Immediate storage savings and mail server relief are achieved as a result almost immediately. Typical results shows individual mail files being reduced by 60 to 80 percent after just the first run, and overall net mail storage savings by 35 to 50 percent. In addition, the email deletion policy will be that much easier to enforce in the "single instance" mail store databases.