Thursday, October 30, 1997

Company e-mail boxes straining under load

By STEVE SHIPSIDE / The Guardian

The flurry of camera shake and flat lighting instantly give it away as amateur video. A small, sad-faced boy looks into the lens and holds up a broken toy. The video clip ends.

Home movies? Certainly. A complaint for customer service? Quite possibly, and there's the rub, for the video in question is a digital file sitting in the e-mail box of a major toy company. It's jumbled in among hundreds of others, text, sound, and video -- and all of them need to be dealt with now.

We all know the feeling of returning to the computer after an absence and being greeted with dozens, if not hundreds, of e-mails. Knowing full well that most of them are entirely useless, we still have to sift through for those few crucial missives buried in the chaff of chatter. Who hasn't felt the temptation to delete the lot and plead computer error?

Now spare a thought for the webmasters of a company with an Internet site, a shop window for the world, but one with a letter box in it, through which every day, at any hour e-mail pours in. Some of it's junk mail, much of it's trivia, but there are also customer complaints, valuable input and invaluable sales leads.

It has to be sorted, sent to the relevant department, tracked, acted on and replied to. United Airlines, which responds to all the e-mail it receives, sends out 800,000 replies to customers every week.

Not that a reply guarantees your work is done: more important e-mails have to be stored and archived in such a way that anyone concerned can retrieve them. The company that deletes that lot has failed to get the message in every sense.

Until a few years ago e-mail was simple -- deceptively so, as it turns out. Messages consisted of text, and since they were almost entirely within the company it was easy to control the software that created and sent them and the way staff used them. Processing e-mail was a matter of reading it, then passing it on or throwing it away.

Once you use e-mail to interface with customers, however, the gloves come off. E-mail is so ubiquitous that any number of applications can produce it. Not just dedicated e-mail packages but networked groupware, bulletin board software like AT&T mail, and even proprietary Internet browsers such as AOL. Nor does it all come from computers: increasingly, people are sending and receiving e-mail from their portable phones, while set-top boxes let couch potatoes e-mail from their TVs.

According to figures collected by the magazine Electronic Mail and Messaging Systems, there are more than 150 million e-mailers worldwide.

The good news for online businesses facing the stampede is that the adoption curve seems to have peaked. It's still growing in 1997, but at a rate of closer to 50 percent per year. Quite why isn't clear, but it's possible that those companies and individuals who really needed it now have it. The bad news, however, is that e-mail is no longer simply text.

"The growth in number of people using e-mail may be leveling off, but the growth in the amount of data is exponential," says Eric Arum, editor of Electronic Mail and Messaging systems. "E-mail has become multimedia, with the exchange of digital images, attached files like spreadsheets and presentations, not to mention MIME-encoded messages (mail messages comprising sound/graphics sent over the Net) and HTML Web pages being passed on. The second generation of WebTV (a set-top box for Internet browsing on a television) has a port to plug in a camcorder, so you can record your message and send that as a file."

Crucially, the breeding ground for these new media messages is not in business but among consumers, leading to a potential headache when the two meet for e-commerce.

"While businesses are still fretting about how to italicize and underline on their Web pages," adds Arnum, "kids are using digital cameras to include a picture of themselves whenever they chat online."

The headache begins when all of these different and frequently bulky data types start pouring into the corporate mailbox. Analyst David Marshak, from the Boston-based Patricia Seybold Group of consultants, recalls that one of his clients had been forced to upgrade the amount of disk space used to store messages, from 5Mb per person 18 months ago to 75Mb today. "And this is a modern telecommunications company with a rigid and efficient policy on disposing of unimportant messages."

Arnum concurs: "A company that feels secure with a terrabyte of storage (for e-mail) right now, is going to need 100 terrabytes in three years if the multimedia mail explosion continues apace."

The long-term answer, in so far as there is one, is not storage but more efficient handling. Prompt action, automatic filters and strict disposal policies help manage the messaging mass. Network systems contain intelligent agents which track e-mail, logging who reads it, who deletes it, who replies to it and can if necessary automatically e-mail the sender with these details.

The problem is that with so many data types, a dedicated e-mail package, designed with text in mind, may no longer be adequate. Especially if, as in many commercial sites, all feedback is sent to a single e-mail box.

Ideally, in-boxes would need to be integrated with a tracking package and a database for storage and retrieval. Currently, that can only really be done using expensive customizing and bespoke software, although the e-mail handling built into groupware products goes some way to overcoming the hurdle.

One thing the analysts agree on is that there is no easy answer. In the meantime, the smart advice is to invest in hard drive manufacturers.

(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service.)