We’re obviously all too familiar with the type of spam that advertises everything from mortgages to bigger body parts, but there’s another common type of spam-like content in organizations that we do very little about.

These messages include content from mailing lists, requests for assistance of various types, and other types of messages on which we might be copied, but that are not sent directly to our attention. For example, I subscribe to a very useful mailing list on a leading messaging system that, between May 30 and Sept. 26, has contributed 9,269 e-mails and 105.1MBs to my inbox. The content is something I have chosen to receive and so it’s not really spam, but it has an impact not unlike spam on my bandwidth and storage requirements.

At Interop in late September, there was a fair amount of discussion around Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0 or whatever you’d like to call it. One of the points discussed in a keynote on the topic was the impact that collaboration tools, such as wikis, can have on organizing this type of content in more meaningful ways. However, an interesting aspect of the discussion involved the reduction in bandwidth and storage that these tools can have on e-mail systems.

Because visitors share information in an organized manner, there is a central copy of messages that everyone accesses whenever they’re interested in reviewing the discussion. This can save enormous amounts of bandwidth and storage, since there is one copy of a message posted to a wiki, not one copy for everyone who requests the information, potentially resulting in dramatically less traffic.

In my personal example, such a capability would have reduced the impact on my messaging system by an average of 78 messages and 0.9MBs per day. Multiply that by a few thousand users that might subscribe to mailing lists in a large organization and you’ll see a significant impact on bandwidth and storage.

I’d like to get your views on this. Does the utility of receiving mailing list content directly in your mailbox without having to go to a wiki, portal or some other tool outweigh the negative that these messages have on messaging systems? Please let me know your thoughts.

Michael Osterman is principal analyst of Osterman Research.