Universities: Email Growing Out of Control
College and university students are increasingly using social media tools and email to manage their academic and personal lives on and off campus.
According to Nicholas Carr’s recent blog post, “The Email Monster,” Amherst College is managing approximately 180,000 inbound emails each day — all from a student population of 1,600. One of the interesting aspects of this figure is that 94 percent of the email are spam, further exascerbating the college’ storage infrastructure.
The storage required for the emails received last year equaled the total storage required for all the emails received in the preceding five years combined. And 95% of email storage now goes to holding email attachments rather than the messages themselves. Email has become everyone’s personal data warehouse.
As Carr points out, as email continues burden organizations, many will consider outsourcing this vital function. If they do, the need to offer archiving and indexing tools to search for pertinent information will be essential.
