The value of e-mail at Darwin Professional Underwriters is simple to see for the company’s CIO, Bob Asensio: In Darwin’s disaster recovery plans, the return of e-mail service needs to be almost instantaneous. “I believe e-mail probably is the most critical system our IT department manages,” says Asensio.

E-mail has come a long way in a short time. Its use has become so massive some business people believe it is robbing people of interpersonal skills. A few businesses even have started No E-Mail Fridays, as if it could be controlled like business-casual wardrobe.

Sara Radicati, president and CEO of the Radicati Group, a management consulting company, estimates the average business user gets about 100 e-mail messages a day, and the number keeps growing annually. “The number is spiraling, but the problem is people are putting the focus [of perceived communication problems] on e-mail erroneously,” she says. “If employees weren’t using e-mail, it would be something else—meetings, phone calls, letters.”

E-mail makes it so much easier for people to do their work, Radicati acknowledges, but it also takes time and effort away from other forms of communication. “It’s hard to judge, but putting the blame on e-mail is not the solution,” she says.

“E-mail is a critical customer communication, and being able to manage that in the underwriting and claims processes and not lose track of the documents is very important,” says Matt Josefowicz, director of insurance for the consultant Novarica.

Darwin Professional Underwriters is a relatively young company heading into its fifth year, according to Asensio. The carrier never has placed limits on mailbox size nor done anything to police e-mail, but over the last 13 months, Asensio claims the company’s e-mail volume has grown by 70 percent. Growing pains have been evident in several areas, but backing up the e-mail server has been particularly difficult. “E-mail is notoriously hard to back up,” he says. Darwin currently has a backup window that starts on Friday night and runs until about noon on Monday.

Asensio reports his company is in the process of addressing several e-mail issues, including record retention and space. “We’re looking at putting in an e-mail archive solution,” he says. Darwin has been researching the problem, meeting with vendors, going through demos, and trying to look at it not as an isolated problem but as storage management and record-retention issues. “We want to see whether we can make some headway into establishing the way we want to manage our storage while providing for record retention with better backups,” he says.