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Recent findings just released by Mimecast shows that only one in three emails received is 'essential' for work. The company, which is a supplier of cloud-based email archiving, hosting, security and continuity for Microsoft Exchange and Office 365, is highlight that only this small percentage of email is considered essential for work purposes with an additional 14 percent categorized as being of 'critical importance.'

The report titled, “The Shape of Email” polled IT departments on email practices and the contents of the average employee inbox in order to develop a picture of the current status and value of business email.

The research explores the changing nature of the inbox, remote access to email and the use of social media, and will be updated regularly to follow the journey of those changes, including analysis of real corporate email traffic.

"The Shape of Email is a starting point in helping us understand the quality of the information residing in the inboxes of organizations across the world," said Nathaniel Borenstein, chief scientist, Mimecast, in a statement.

Borenstein said that what is clear is that the average employee faces a significant challenge in simply processing the information that comes into their inbox and identifying which messages are genuinely business critical.

"We often end up working for email, rather than having email work for us," he added.

However, email will remain a fundamental business tool for many years to come. It is the global standard; but not always the gold standard. It is therefore vital that email hosting can continue to develop and adapt as technology and working practices change.

"By creating the Shape of Email Report, we hope to deepen our collective understanding of the current state of enterprise inboxes, which should help us understand where email is going. We'd love to hear from anyone else who may have insights," Borenstein commented

Through investigating the value of the emails received by business users, the report is able to track the 'shape' of the average organization's email and visually represent email usage.

Additionally, the research found that the value of information found in an inbox varies considerably. Nearly two out of every three emails received are considered to be non-essential. On average, 11 percent of email is personal, non-work related. And the remaining content is functional at best, with an estimated seven percent of emails inside the average inbox considered to be spam or junk.

One important thing that the research found was that the businesses were slowly getting social as organizations now commonly allow the use of social media in the workplace. LinkedIn (News - Alert) is the most commonly used (in 55 percent of businesses), followed by Facebook at 47 percent.

However, only one in three organizations believes that the use of social media in the workplace has genuinely decreased reliance on email, with the impact of social media on email usage limited by security concerns.