commentary Every company I've worked at has had e-mail problems at one stage or another. I'm sure you can say the same.

You know the drill ... first, one astute soul perks his head up. "Anyone else can't get their e-mail?" he asks those around him. Then a wave of grumbling starts to roll around the office, as the entire team realises that the rug has yet again been swept out from under their feet.

"E-mail's down!" comes the universal cry.

Ten years ago, this problem would have been shrugged off as just part and parcel of dealing with a relatively new technology that your business maintained as a privilege. However, today e-mail truly forms part of the bedrock foundation upon which many corporations are built. Without e-mail, it's not just communications that grinds to a screaming halt. It's many companies' entire revenue-producing business function.

This is why it's all the more surprising to your writer that so many organisations continue to maintain their own e-mail systems, rather than handing them off to a specialist third party.

Western Australia's Department of Planning and Infrastructure is one group that has almost learned its e-mail lessons the hard way recently. The department issued a cry for outside help last month as its Microsoft Exchange-based e-mail system had started to suffer frequent outages.

"The existing messaging environment suffers from frequent outages (more than 24 hours per annum) due to a combination of hardware and software failures, e-mail corruption and human error," DPI wrote in tender documents. The organisation had "no form of failure protection of disaster recovery" for its e-mail systems, and the risk of data loss was increasing "dramatically".

If your writer could give one piece of advice to groups like DPI who are struggling with e-mail gremlins, it would be to get an external body to administer your e-mail.

E-mail is a classic example of a business support function that should be outsourced: it's a commodity; there are specialists that can do it better than you can; it can be charged as a service; and it requires technical skills which are hard to find. You should even be able to get a decent price from outsourcers, due to the economies of scale they can leverage.

There's even a previous example of a commonly used business communications system which is commonly outsourced ... its called telephony and is normally taken care of by someone like Telstra or Optus.

Let someone else handle the flood of viruses, e-mail and spam that come with e-mail. Let someone else take the call from your CEO when they can't send that crucial document that will stop the share price from crashing.

If you're nervous, you don't even have to outsource your whole e-mail operation -- start off by letting someone else filter your messages for malware and spam before they hit your front door.

Perhaps the biggest argument for outsourced e-mail is that no IT manager your writer has ever talked to has regretted making such a move -- and stories are pretty thin on the ground about bad experiences in this area.

After you've got e-mail out of the way, don't fire your previous administrators. Instead, re-dedicate the time of these valuable and experienced staff to higher matters, such as systems consolidation or upgrades -- the sort of thing that will actually drive benefits and efficiencies to your business going forward.

The thing they should have been doing in the first place, rather than babysitting a commodity piece of infrastructure.

Outsourced e-mail: a panacea or a potential nightmare? Make your views heard below this article, or drop me a line at renai.lemay@zdnet.com.au.