If you work for yourself, you might generate and receive a few dozen emails a day. If you have a small team of employees, then your business will probably send and receive five times as many emails than you would alone. That may not seem a great number and, indeed, if your company does a lot of its work online and uses email frequently, then the number of emails generated and received each day could be far greater.

This begs the question of what you do with all those emails. A good number will be SPAM, and your internet provider might have an automatic facility that recognises SPAM for what it is and automatically consigns it to the SPAM folder (this, of course, can cause problems if emails are incorrectly sent there, causing you to miss an important message). You can always delete your SPAM messages as well as irrelevant or unimportant messages (e.g. one that simply says ‘thanks’ in reply to a message sent by you).

But there are important rules regarding email retention that mean you need to be careful about which messages you send to the recycle bin and which you send to your email archive folder. Email archive is an important part of email management, ensuring that you keep the right emails without clogging up your inbox. A good email archive system also allows you to find your old emails without having to spend hours searching.

In order to keep storage costs to a minimum, control your email retention and keep in line with regulations, it has become vital to have a good system for archiving emails. If you are struggling with this, you could always seek advice from email management companies such as Mimecast, which can review your company’s needs and help you to find the most effective, efficient way of managing your emails.

If you store your archived emails effectively then you free up a lot of space in your inbox and on backup systems. It is important to archive them properly so that you can find them again easily, but also because they are important business documents and ought to be treated with care. It is far better to invest a little time getting your email archive solutions in place, than to rue the day you deleted important emails to free up space … and face a hefty fine for failure to comply with email retention rules.

This is a guest post by Adam a new Londoner, who has interests in recruitment, all things techy, a passion for travel and a love of fashion. He blogs about recruitment, travel and IT/technology as well as latest trends in mens and womens fashion. If you want Adam to write you specific content, feel free to message me on Twitter (@NewburyNewbie).