The Information and Records Management Society (IRMS) curates a regularly updated “Records Management Toolkit” to assist UK public sector schools in their compliance with the Freedom of Information Act 2000. Arena Group's Neil Maude has written for us a series of articles looking at the practical application of the principles described in this toolkit. In Part 5, Neil looks at e-mail management.

E-mail has become the communication tool of choice for most office workers. It’s quick and cheap, with the convenient benefit that the recipient of your message doesn’t have to be available when you are.

But even though e-mail, like a letter or a memo, is just another way to pass on a message, somehow we treat it differently. For starters, e-mails tend to be written using less formal language, and most people spend less time on the layout of an e-mail than they would if sending the same message in a letter.