A study from Oasys Software found that many businesses are lacking in their email management systems, which could potentially put them in legal trouble. Through a survey of its customers, Oasys found that 96 percent of employees believe their companies are already in legal hot water. What’s more is those surveyed consisted of lawyers, accountants, and many other professions that have very confidential information.

WebProNews spoke with Alec Milton, the CEO of Oasys, who told us that 92 percent of employees spend up to one hour per day searching for email. In addition, another 64 percent of those surveyed said that they were forced to delete important emails because their inbox was too full.

Milton went on to say that these issues would likely get worse since the amount of email that employees receive will increase going forward. A report from The Radicati Group predicts that the number of worldwide email accounts will increase from 3.1 billion in 2011 to nearly 4.1 billion by the end of 2015. From this number, the technology market research firm expects a large portion of this growth to be from corporate email accounts. The report stated:

“Over the next four years, however, we expect corporate email accounts to increase at a faster pace than consumer email accounts. This will be particularly due to the growth of affordable cloud-based email services. Many organizations are using cloud-based email services as a way to extend email services to kiosk workers who may not have had access to email in the past.”

Milton told us that email management problems needed to be taken seriously, especially as email becomes a primary mode of communication. Well-known investment firm Piper Jaffray is not even exempt from these issues. The company was fined $700K by Finra for failure to retain emails.

“It’s the business communication of choice, but people don’t treat it with the same care that they did with their paper documents in the past,” he said.

In terms of advice, Milton suggested that employees file their important emails in the same way that they would file paper documents in folders. He also recommends that companies use software services, such as Oasys, to protect themselves from legal turmoil.

Are you taking the proper precautions to make sure your business’s email system is effective? Let us know.