Lost White House Emails Also Common Issue for U.S. Businesses

AUSTIN, TX -- (MARKET WIRE) -- April 16, 2007 -- The current White House scramble to locate and provide historical emails for legal discovery is also a common and growing problem for U.S. businesses, revealed a new survey conducted by Osterman Research, Inc., sponsored by MessageOne (www.messageone.com). The survey, conducted this month, strongly suggests that corporate email storage and retrieval is not well managed and with increasing legal requests for email, that businesses and management are at risk.

The MessageOne Survey of Rogue Email Practices, by independent email research firm Osterman Research, included interviews with employees working in medium and large sized U.S. businesses around the country. The survey found that the average employee sends and receives some 170 emails a day while at work, and revealed that 33% of them use personal email accounts at least once or twice a week for business purposes -- 17% of those do so every day. Furthermore, 15.7% of respondents admitted to using their personal email to avoid corporate review or retention of their messages.

According to industry analyst Michael Osterman, President of Osterman Research, "With the increasing importance of email as a business communications tool, the fact that employees are conducting business through outside email accounts leaves businesses with no formal record of those emails vulnerable to all sorts of risk. This underscores the tremendous importance for businesses to ensure they are covered with a strong email archiving solution that stores, tracks and locates all of an organization's email."

Additionally, the survey showed that when the corporate email system goes down, 60% of employees use a personal email account to conduct business communications. "The question for IT managers is how do you account for business emails sent when the corporate email system is down," asked Osterman. "Management must address how to recover those lost emails, because it is certain that eventually the corporate email system will go down. These survey results reinforce the critical need to have reliable email continuity in place to eliminate the need for employees to resort to outside email."

MessageOne, the sponsor of the survey, is the leading provider of managed services for email management, archiving and business continuity. "As email use has really taken off, we have observed a growing disconnect between executives, IT management and employees about how and when email is used, tracked and stored," explained MessageOne President and CEO Satin Mirchandani. "It is time for all organizations to gain control of email management, including email continuity and archiving. With best of class email archiving, businesses can proactively control message retention and deletion in accordance with government regulations."

Other data revealed in the survey included a high level of end user reliance on corporate email: 40% of those surveyed said that they would find it intolerable to have more than one hour without email, while 11% said the same for ten minutes and 4.9% for only one minute.

About MessageOne

Headquartered in Austin, Texas, MessageOne is a leading provider of managed services for email management, archive, and business continuity. The Company's Email Management Services (EMS) provides comprehensive email archiving, continuity, recovery, security, and storage management for enterprise email systems. In addition, MessageOne's AlertFind™ provides guaranteed emergency notification and escalation to help companies protect their employees during any crisis or disaster. More than 1,200 customers around the world depend on MessageOne for its award-winning managed services. For more information, please visit www.messageone.com.

About Osterman Research

Osterman Research (www.ostermanresearch.com) was founded by Michael Osterman in 2001. Since that time, the company has become one of the leading analyst firms in the messaging and collaboration space, providing research, analysis, white papers and other services. The core of Osterman Research's capabilities is its market research panel of IT professionals and end users that are regularly surveyed on a variety of topics related to email, instant messaging, spam, collaboration, security, storage, archiving, data retention, compliance and other areas.

Contact Information: For more media information, contact: Lisa Hendrickson Email Contact 516-767-8390