The need for organizations to implement e-mail management software -- specifically, monitoring, reporting and archiving tools -- will become more urgent, say experts, as the volume of mail puts greater stress on storage and bandwidth resources.

"The growth in e-mail has been steady and huge, to the point that everybody is having major storage and performance problems," says David Via, an analyst at Ferris Research in San Francisco.

And because users rely so heavily on their e-mail these days, they tend not to tolerate delays in message delivery. "People expect the messages to go from here to there in a matter of seconds. They don't care how many messages, or what the architecture is like," says Bueffel. "They just expect that when they click Send, it should be there."

Monitoring for bottlenecks

Although e-mail servers such as Exchange come equipped with utilities, they often can't provide the depth or breadth of information that e-mail managers need in order to diagnose -- and anticipate -- problems.