When was the last time your company performed preventative maintenance on the email system? If you're like most people, it's not been done. Email systems have become necessary tools in the operation of businesses, yet very few people, from the home user to the corporation, have a plan in place to offset downtime. A new survey conducted by King Research says that of the 220 respondents surveyed, 96 percent reported that email outages have caused significant drops in productivity - some to the point that employees were unable to work at all. Worse, 71 percent of respondents say they spend two hours or less a month on maintenance to the email system.

Archiving has been suggested as a good way to limit the burden on the email system, but 45 percent of those surveyed have actually done so.