Half delete email without reading

Office workers in the UK are deleting over half of email they receive in their inboxes, according to a new survey.

The poll of 100 UK business mangers, sponsored by Waterford Technologies, showed that 55 per cent of those surveyed deleted between 10 and 50 emails a day without bothering to read them.

Newsletters made up the largest group of unread messages, with 40 per cent saying they deleted them without a look. The next most deleted email was spam, followed by irrelevant emails they were copied in on from co-workers, the survey found.

The inbox influx is costing time, the survey found, as 55 per cent of respondents said they spent half an hour each week looking for a specific, business-critical email.

Malcolm Etchells, managing director for Europe at Waterford Technologies, said: "With email volumes exploding, employees are reaching their inbox limits faster than ever before. However, it is IT departments that are feeling the brunt of the email burden because it is not cost effective to increase inbox limits as IT departments already struggle to cope with the storage demands put on servers."

The survey also showed that the most commonly-attached files were Microsoft documents followed by images and PDFs.