• Email is a business critical application
  More than 80% of respondents saw email as critical or extremely important for internal communication within their organisation. A similar proportion highlighted the importance of email for external communication with customers, suppliers and business partners.
• Email is a pre-requisite for doing business in the modern commercial world
  When we looked more closely at the perceptions of email importance by company size, we saw an important difference. Smaller companies rely on email much less for internal communications, almost certainly because it is more likely that employees will be working in close proximity to each other. The importance of email for external communications was consistent across all organisation sizes, however, highlighting that email is now an important business-to-business communication mechanism that all organisations must have in place to trade effectively.
• Email is also important for personal communications and the line between business and personal use is often blurred
  Around half of respondents indicated that there was significant personal email traffic being sent or received via their company systems and almost four out of five (78%) acknowledged that users are accessing their personal email accounts via company equipment. Conversely two thirds of respondents were aware of users in their organisation accessing their corporate email account via their home PC.
• Larger companies acknowledge the need for personal use policies more than smaller ones
  Due to the potential security and other issues, over 80% of large businesses (those with more than 5,000 employees) have policies in place to cover personal use of email. Indeed, 18% of these larger organisations ban the use of personal email in the workplace altogether. The proportion of companies with a personal use policy drops to 68% for medium businesses (between 500 and 5,000 employees), 49% for small businesses (5 to 500 employees) and 24% for micro businesses (less than 5 employees).
• Email has moved far beyond simple desk-to-desk messaging
  Four out of five respondents indicated that attachments are frequently sent and received both internally and to/from customers and partners. Almost two thirds (64%) said that it was common for personal email messages to have attachments. Email has thus moved from a simple messaging medium to an important vehicle for distributing documents and other objects that is now often used in preference to traditional postal and internal physical mail delivery services. Furthermore, email access whilst away from the desk is becoming more important. 64% have implemented or are planning to implement Web-based access to email. The equivalent percentages for access via VPNs, PDAs and Smartphones were 58%, 36% and 24% respectively.
• The pressure on suppliers and service providers to address the issue of security is appropriate and must be maintained.

The findings presented here demonstrate that email has woven its way into the fabric of both business and personal communications and that separating the two is at best difficult and at worst impossible. It is also clear that the many-to-many relationship between email accounts and access
mechanisms means that security and management must be tackled at a systems level. IT vendors and services providers therefore have a responsibility to ensure that effective security is adequately incorporated into their solutions. For large businesses, the spotlight here is on Microsoft and IBM who control 62% and 18% of the email server market respectively with Exchange and Lotus Domino. At the lower end of the market, the pressure must be on the ISP community who, for example, serve 53% of Micro businesses with POP3/SMTP services. The specifics of email security will be covered further in a subsequent Quocirca report based on the same study.