A woman in a major British media company recently contacted the company's entire, 30,000-strong staff with an urgent query: "Has anyone got any blu-tack?"
This type of "occupational spam" -- in this case, a plea for the kind of adhesive typically used to stick posters to walls -- has clogged up e-mail servers so much that an English city council has banned the use of internal e-mail one day a week. External and personal mail is unaffected by the ban.
The plan has provoked strong comment, ranging from derision to disbelief. "They should go back to using typewriters," said John Strand of media consultancy Strand Consult.
"I think they're nutcases," said David Ferris, CEO of Ferris Research, a consultancy for collaboration technology.
Liverpool City Council has told its 6,000 employees who use e-mail at work to avoid e-mail altogether on Wednesdays.
"You know that Monday morning feeling where you've got 200 e-mails to open before you can get on and do your job?" said Mat Finnegan, spokesman for the council. "That's my lot normally, and the chief exec gets about 800. Useful tool though e-mail can be, it can also be a huge albatross.
"My job is to talk to you, to talk to the media, not to reply to a bunch of e-mails from my colleagues. It's all internal spaghetti, really. I couldn't get my job done."
Finnegan had to be contacted by telephone for this interview. His e-mail address does not appear on the council's website.
People at the council were spending 10 minutes to write e-mails to colleagues who worked next door.
"People were getting into the habit of forwarding on queries rather than 'taking ownership' of the problem, as the jargon has it, and dealing with it themselves," he said.
The problem at Liverpool Council is staggering. The authority's 6,000 employees were generating 100,000 e-mails a day for internal communication, compared to 6,000 external and personal e-mails.
While employees will not be prevented from sending internal e-mails, or punished for doing so, they will be contacted and encouraged to avoid mail on Wednesdays.
The scheme is on trial at the moment, but the council says it's delighted with the results achieved over the first week. "I only got three e-mails last Wednesday. It was brilliant. Of course, the chief executive told all staff that if there is an emergency they should do whatever needs to be done, but stop bothering with the stupid stuff," Finnegan said.
Bizarre as the council's decision might seem, analysts have found that occupational spam is a major problem. A survey conducted by Gartner discovered that only one third of organizational e-mail actually requires an immediate response.
"E-mail's success is also its biggest weakness: It is too popular," said Maurene Grey, Intranets and Electronic workplace analyst with Gartner. "Trying to be more helpful and communicative, employees unnecessarily e-mail their co-workers too often. They clutter e-mail inboxes, fill up servers and sap productivity with the volume of these messages."
Ferris said that the problem is developing an e-mail culture: "One hundred years ago it took four hours a day to answer the post, 25 years ago people did the same on the phone and now they use e-mail. It's nothing to freak out at. In fact it's pretty clear that e-mail has increased productivity and reduced business cycle times. These are not business people who are saying this."
However, according to Finnegan, the council's decision has prompted wide interest. "One major corporation has contacted us and said they will deploy the same policy next week."
And staff reacted positively: "Everybody lightened up a bit really, cause you do get into a stage where you've got, 60, 80 stacking up and you think, how am I going to get through this lot! It's all about getting people to think about how they communicate, and amazingly, face-to-face or voice-to-voice is often the best way," Finnegan said.
"We've kind of gotten out of the habit."
