"This gave me the reports I was looking for to isolate the mailboxes that needed to be deleted. There were about 1,000 of them," says Hook.

He also recommends configuring e-mail servers to reduce traffic. UHS uses Control to identify the departments and users that exchange the highest volumes of e-mail. Hook then locates those mailboxes on the same Exchange server. "That way, the mail isn't always going over your network," says Hook. The strategy also helps when the mail contains large attachments, like graphics files and PowerPoint presentations.

Large attachments have been a problem for Ray Martin, the IS technical manager at Monrovia Nursery Co. in Azusa, Calif. "We have had some PowerPoint presentations of 120MB that go out to a dozen people, and all the other outbound e-mail backs up behind them," says Martin. "We've attempted to restrict the attachment sizes, but the limits just keep going up."

Shared file spaces and FTP sites are an obvious solution. But it's often very difficult to persuade employees to use those options, when clicking "attach" in their e-mail clients is so easy to do. So Martin has turned to TrafficShaper, a tool from Packeteer Inc. that's designed to ensure that big attachments don't block the network.

Traffic prioritization tools recognize different types of IP traffic and allot different amounts of bandwidth to each, based on organizational policies. Some time-sensitive services, such as voice over IP or virtual private networking, might guarantee that a small amount of bandwidth is always available.