Jerry Lawson at net.law.blog links to Employers Try New Rules to  Promote E-Mail Etiquette with the question "how can employers boost productivity by encouraging this etiquette?"   The article  focuses on the annoying and often-embarrassing misuse of the "Reply All" and cc functions, with a weird  foray into the politics of the cc and bcc fields.

Coming from a law firm background where I've spent most of the last four years functioning in part as the Exchange admin, I'd argue that the decreased productivity resulting from overzealous use of the "Reply to All" options in interoffice e-mail (one of the points of the article) is insignificant when compared to the time wasted by attorneys (and, more realistically, secretaries) cleaning up old e-mail, filing and deleting messages from the Sent Items folder.   My solution?   In Lotus Notes, users are given the option to "Send & File" a message, but that functionality doesn't exist in Outlook.   So, we added it (or, at least, I compiled it...I originally "borrowed" the code from Sue Mosher).  And, for good measure, I added a "Send & Delete" button, allowing users to promptly delete messages as they are sent,  hopefully eliminating the need to later manually delete all of those "where are we going to lunch?"-type messages that clutter up the Information Store.

Nothing overwhelming, certainly.  But by reducing the need to clean out the Sent Items folder in Outlook (generally part of a panicked response to a storage warning), I'm sure we've added  more potentially-productive time to a secretary's average work day than a "don't use Reply All* or BCC" policy would.

*On another note, I know from the LawNet list-serves that many firms have written add-ins for Outlook to warn users if a Distribution List is included when the user clicks "Reply All," in an attempt  to avoid mishaps like the "How's the prostate??" comment mentioned in the article.