I had an interesting discussion with DYS Analytics last week about some upcoming product announcements. We discussed the importance of being able to control how users employ messaging systems and the problems that can arise when users, no matter how well intentioned they are, make mistakes when using e-mail or when they send messages in inefficient ways.

While a great deal of attention has rightly been focused on the storage and bandwidth wasted by spam, it’s important to understand the waste that can occur because of users not doing things in the most efficient manner.

For example, DYS has found that large e-mails (10 megabytes or larger) are really not the primary culprit in clogging e-mail systems. Instead, the most significant impact on e-mail system efficiency comes from e-mails of average size that are sent to very large numbers of users. For example, DYS encountered a situation at one of its customers in which a user was sending a 2MB corporate newsletter to thousands of internal users, resulting in substantial storage and bandwidth requirements. A simple adjustment to the way the newsletter was sent resulted in significant savings and greater e-mail system efficiency.

As unified communications becomes more widely used during the next few years, the importance of addressing these unintentional sources of inefficiency will become more important as more content is stored in users’ mailboxes and storage and bandwidth considerations become even more important.

Perhaps the best way to start addressing these issues is to start small. For example, some companies have implemented a monitoring capability that will allow e-mail administrators to review the e-mail behavior of individual users. Using this tool, the behavior of the five biggest users of e-mail each week can be identified and reviewed. It’s likely that better ways of sending communications can be identified that can save dramatically on storage and bandwidth.

How reasonable or important is this for your organization? Please let me know your experience with helping users to become more efficient in using e-mail and other communication tools.

Michael Osterman is principal analyst of Osterman Research.