Will Cox:

I'll hazard a guess that 90% of all corporate e-mail sent is crap, consisting of one-line appendages to massively forwarded posts.

As someone who has assigned co-workers a slot in my spam-filter, I know where you're coming from. And while I agree that a few simple changes to popular MUAs would help to stem the tide, I think that it would be more helpful to attack the root causes. Unfortunately this requires more than just some tweaks to the clients; I'm talking about architectural as well as behavioral shifts.

The symptom is not just the storage required to keep all this email. It is the distraction and the low signal-to-noise ratio that spews into the daily corporate inbox.

First, why use email as a discussion tool? Convenience? Why do all of the "messages" that arrive in your inbox have to be email? If your MUA made it just as easy to post to a discussion group as it was to send an email to your group, you'd reduce the storage requirement from N to 1/N (where N is the size of the group in question). Storage is centralized, where the cost per MB is much lower than on the desktop, and backups are consistently applied. You'd be able to apply a single corporate policy to message retention. The group would gain from being able to apply searches to a larger body of messages.

(Yes, I'm aware that Outlook Express and Outlook provide support for discussion groups. But I've yet to see it implemented in a way that treats discussion groups like email threads, with the same ease of both sending and receiving. Is there a way to make Outlook display the discussion messages in your Inbox? What if someone starts a new discussion that they think you should be in on?)

Second, in all the corporate email systems that I know of, you're storing every message at least twice: once for the sender and once for the receiver. Make a single copy of the message and send a reference to the message to the receiver. The message is retained in one place, and again you can reap the benefits of being centrally stored.

Third, and probably the easiest to solve but the hardest to implement: attachments. One of the more annoying things I've seen is for someone to send out a large attachment (several meg) to everyone in a large-ish group. This is so easy to solve because there must be a hundred ways of allowing the sender to share the file with the group without sending it over email. It's hard to implement because it is so easy from the sender's point of view to just click "send". This last one could probably be solved by a little tweak in the MUA.