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If you qualify as the average business professional, you’ve most likely encountered a daunting, never-ending e-mail inbox that you’ve had to organize and sort through in the process of responding to messages. But, did you know that there are legal implications associated with the inability to properly manage e-mail?

A survey from software products manufacturer Oasys Limited involving 1,237 employees across a variety of occupations has found that an astounding 96 percent believe their companies face some type of legal risk linked to inadequate hosted Exchange e-mail management. Meanwhile, 1 in 5 stated that their company faces “high risk.”

Unfortunately, but not too surprisingly, this neglect could come with a pretty costly price tag (News - Alert). According to the IDC, the cost of identifying and handling information during the e-discovery process could be as much as $12 billion and reach upwards of $22 billion.

"What most companies don't understand are the costly challenges associated with having a disorganized e-mail system in the event of litigation," said attorney Joseph Dennis, in a press release. "In some cases we've seen companies fined by regulatory agencies as much as $700,000 for not being able to produce specific emails under very tight timeframes imposed by the courts during the e-discovery process."

A major factor? The time wasted that inevitably comes along with a disorganized e-mail inbox. According to the survey, more than one-third of business professionals spend up to two or more hours daily searching for misplaced or hard-to-find e-mails, with a whopping 91.8 percent spending an average of one hour per day doing so.

Meanwhile, business professionals involved in the survey admitted to deleting important e-mails due to limitations on inbox size.

Of course, this is sure to be problematic with e-mail volume projected to increase, and companies continuing to lack effective solutions for handling higher volumes. In fact, technology market research firm Radicati Group recently reported that the number of e-mail users is expected to uptick to 1.9 billion by 2013.

"IT departments simply aren't prepared to handle the exploding volume of data they are seeing and often end up imposing inbox size limits on the individual users, contributing to the problem of misplaced email," Alec Milton, CEO of Oasys Software, said in a statement.

These surprising stats have prompted Oasys Software to further educate the enterprise and SMBs on the necessity for structured solutions for e-mail management. The company’s own solution, Mail Manager 5.3, is built for easier searching and filing and sharing e-mails.

"The results of the Business Behavior & Email Management Project demonstrate that companies are in need of a sensible email management system," said Milton. "By prompting users to file e-mails as they read and create them, Mail Manager provides a simple way for emails to be structured and accessible by multiple parties in the same folders as other related documents and easily findable when the stakes are high."

In an interview with TMCnet, Milton offered up some inside advice on other steps companies can take to avoid poor e-mail management and its procrastination-inducing, and legal, repercussions, especially in situations where an employee returns to a full inbox after being away from the office for a lengthened period of time.

While organizing messages into structured folders or implementing an e-mail filing system can serve as short-term fixes, Milton suggests a simple, manual process involving skimming, prioritizing and reducing. First, Milton says, skim through the e-mail list by reading the subject lines. Any that stand out as important and time-critical should be moved into an “urgent” folder, and junk e-mail should be deleted. With a shorter list on hand and urgent messages processed, employees can then sort messages by subject and start by reading the last message in the e-mail thread to see whether any matters have been resolved and won’t need additional attention.

Tammy Wolf is a TMCnet web editor. She covers a wide range of topics, including IP communications and information technology. To read more of her articles, please visit her columnist page.

Edited by Stefanie Mosca