The first step is deploying a good e-mail monitoring and reporting tool, advises Scott Bueffel, messaging administrator at Con-way Inc., a US$3.7 billion provider of global supply chain services based in San Mateo, Calif. He persuaded management to let him buy Quest Software Inc.'s Spotlight on Exchange and MessageStats reporting and monitoring tools when e-mail performance problems kept cropping up and he couldn't pinpoint the problem with his existing tools.

"In the past, if we had a lot of message traffic on a particular day and management wanted to know where it was coming from and why, I'd have to say, 'I can't tell you. I don't have the tools to identify it,' " says Bueffel, noting that native message-tracking utilities are only useful for diagnosing problems with a single e-mail.

Spotlight monitors e-mail services and provides information on things such as available storage and the size of the routing queue. MessageStats enables Bueffel to run reports on a range of usage statistics.

"We use it for all manner of reporting, based on traffic, volume, growth, forecasting," says Bueffel.

According The Radicati Group Inc., the average corporate e-mail user sends and receives a total of 133 messages, or about 16.4MB of data, per day. IDC estimates that the size of business e-mail sent annually worldwide will exceed 3.5 exabytes (3.5 billion gigabytes) this year, double the amount of two years ago.