Kedrosky, Paul. Next Big Thing: Clean up the Inbox. National Post - Financial Post. June 7, 2004.

Great recent article touching on Sarbanes-Oxley and e-mail. Some quotes ... National Post: "One 1996 study by the Association of Computing Machinery found that subjects had, on average, 2,482 messages in their inbox; they had only an average of 858 items filed in folders. In other words, for every message they had gotten around to filing they had roughly three messages strewn about in their e-mail inbox. I know people like that. One colleague has a few thousand e-mails in his inbox, most of which are months (even years) old. He almost certainly can't find anything in that mail morass, so I'm guessing he keeps it there largely for a feeling of security. Deleting things feels rash, so you might as well keep it -- just in case. Why have we reached this e-mail impasse? Largely because e-mail was intended to be a communications medium; it was supposed to be the electronic equivalent of a brief hallway conversation. Instead it has become something else altogether, a Swiss army knife of the Internet, with responsibilities ranging from communications to personal archives and task management. But e-mail does most of those things poorly. Filing is too hard, tasks scroll off the screen in an ever-filling inbox, and personal archives in e-mail are almost entirely unsearchable. Increasingly, this has consequences. Companies lose sales because leads get lost or accidentally deleted; lawyers lose correspondence in important cases; software vendors worry about vexing e-mails hiding in dark corners; and technical support people lose track of ongoing discussions with frustrated clients. It will only get worse. People are increasingly reliant on e-mail, and they will be more so once the spam problem is reduced -- and once Sarbanes-Oxley's e-mail-retention implications are better understood."