Email administration takes employees about 58 minutes a day, with much of it spent saving and filing messages, searching for attachments and deciding where information should be stored, according to software company MacroView.

Business issues arise when emails remain in individual inboxes, documents are saved without consistency, staff work to their own filing habits and version control breaks down, says the Sydney-based business, whose SureFile email filing tool works with Microsoft 365.

CEO Colin Titmuss says research commissioned by MacroView shows the hour of email administration comes on top of time spent reading and responding to messages.

“Email is where decisions are made, approvals are given, documents are exchanged and client history is captured,” he said.

“But too often that information is left in personal inboxes or relies on individuals to manually save it in the right place.”

Important messages may be lost when staff leave an organisation.

Mr Titmuss says the findings raise questions for the insurance sector regarding how information management affects customer service, handling times and compliance. He says the MacroView suite can file emails from Outlook into SharePoint, Teams and OneDrive, apply metadata, version control and document history, and improve search and retrieval.