5 reasons to enforce email monitoring

Managing storage continues to be one of the most significant challenges for email management, but the right tools can change this from a daily headache to an easy win. Email monitoring gives administrators those tools; providing detailed information on how email is being used, both internally and externally. Here’s a list of the top five ways email monitoring will empower you to optimize your email management.

1. Identify heavy users
Knowing who the heaviest users are can help you plan storage, reallocate mailboxes amongst databases to streamline backups, and also learn about who is emailing whom, both within and outside the company. Knowing your communications channels can help you better understand the business and the needs of your customers while helping you with email management, email management tools can provide you with detailed reports on who sends and/or receives the most email, and who they are communicating with.

2. Manage those attachments
A single word document can take up more space than a hundred plain text emails. And how many different versions of a project plan are floating around inside your mailstores because each revision gets mailed out to everyone on the project team? Email is a convenient, but inefficient file server, and most attachments should really be on stored on SharePoint or a network drive. Moving file transfers to the proper resource will make email management a much easier task. Email monitoring software allows you to receive reports on total space used by attachments, the types of attachments, and real space wasters like duplicates.

3. Find policy violations
When it comes to attachments, non-work related attachments can also chew up huge amounts of storage. Finding the MP3s and AVIs, and reminding users of the company policy can free up lots of disk space rapidly. While you are at it, using email monitoring will enable you to make sure no one is forwarding all their company email to their personal account, or worse, the competition. Good email management includes safeguarding the company’s assets.

4. Storage
Of course, older emails can take up a ton of storage space, and users won’t delete anything unless you stand next to them and press the keys for them. An email monitoring solution can help you to understand how much better it would be if of all that email was moved to the storage managed by an email archiving solution. Using easy to setup rules, your email management of storage becomes an easy task, as messages are moved to the archive automatically. Your users will have no more run-ins with quotas, and no more need for PST files.

5. Retention
Sometimes, email management means knowing when to say goodbye to those older emails. If your company has a document retention policy, it probably defines not only how long to save certain information, but when it needs to be destroyed. An email archiving solution that offers email monitoring features can automatically age out and purge email that exceeds the defined retention policy, automating the housekeeping that you never have time to get to yourself.

As you can see, the winning combination of email archiving and email monitoring makes email management a much easier task, providing in-depth information about how your users communicate, and supports the company’s document retention and other policies. With these tools you can take your Exchange infrastructure to the next level, providing better service with lower storage costs.

This guest post was provided by Christina Goggi on behalf of GFI Software Ltd. GFI is a leading software developer that provides a single source for network administrators to address their network security, content security and messaging needs. Learn more about the benefits of using email monitoring.