Email Attachments – Much more attached then just the attachments…

One of the main reasons for the unprecedented adoption of email has been its ability to attach documents. In one simple action, any one can send any document in any format to anyone in any part of the world. This is just beautiful!

As users increasingly start using emails as a medium for collaboration and document exchange, they don’t realize the underlying cost associated with their actions! Steadily and surely, emails are getting expensive to maintain as administration, bandwidth, and storage costs rise. Based on a ‘Messaging Total Cost of Ownership’ survey performed by the Radicati Group, it was found in an enterprise, email costs an average of $159/user/year to maintain, beyond the original purchase price of hardware and software. A major cause of this cost is email attachments which make up more than 85% of all email data. In fact 20% of all emails contain attachments, but as much as 92% of email resources are consumed by attachments.

Attachments are costly to transmit, process, and administer as email storage. Research shows that the average corporate email user sends and receives over 4MB of email attachments per day. For a company with 5,000 email users, that adds up to about 22 GB per day, 109GB per week, or approximately 435GB per month. When translated into cost, these figures become much more tangible. Assuming that an average company sets mailbox quotas at 40MB per user, with the average "loaded" cost of storage being about $2/MB, it costs approximately $80 per user, per year, to store email messages-most of which are attachments. One of the main reasons in the increase in attachments sizes is the proliferation of all kinds of digital files in our daily lives. Incoming Faxes, Scanned Images, Audio and Video clips, Presentations, Photographs all add up to the average attachment size.

Thus enterprises are facing a daunting list of challenges which can be enumerated and summarized as follows:

1. Server Load Levels:
As emails with attachments pass through the email servers, tests results using the MAPI Messaging Benchmark 2 (MMB2) demonstrate that the average processing loads on email servers like Microsoft Exchange is substantially higher by 350% for emails with attachments than for emails without attachments. And these server load levels are only going to increase as more emails with bigger attachments are sent out by users

2. Multiple Versions and Duplicates of an Attachment:
Interestingly, in a typical organization, out of the total number of email attachments, only 22% of them are original documents while the rest of them are either revisions or duplicates.

The numerous versions of an attachment created by all its recipients represent a greater challenge to the sender to collate all the changes together and form the final version, thereby resulting in more time and effort spent at lower productivity levels.

At any given time, none of the recipients are guaranteed to have the latest version of the attachment. This leads to confusion and misunderstandings among the recipients, resulting in longer decision making times and slowing down the corporate business process.

The duplicates of an attachment hoard up additional storage space while increasing network traffic leading to higher network administration and maintenance costs.

3. Security Issues with Attachments:
In today's world of a heightened sense of security, email attachments represent the single most point of vulnerability for corporate document security plans. Once shared, these attachments become public property with their recipients being completely free to do whatever they please to do with it. There is no way to stop a wayward employee to just walk away with sensitive attachments sitting neatly on his/her computer hard disk as local copies. Senders have no control over the access rights of their attachments neither can ever know what their recipients are doing with it.

So the next time, you have the urge to send out that cool animation file of 3 MB size to all your friends, pause and think about the costs associated with your action. There is a price to pay for this. Someone somewhere is paying for it, if not you directly!