5plus Architects is an award-winning architecture and design studio founded in 2010 with offices in London and Manchester. With 55 staff and 942 projects completed, the firm delivers architecture, master planning, interior design and graphic design across diverse sectors. It operates as one practice across two locations, with COVID-19 strengthening cross-studio collaboration rather than hindering it.
Most Mail Manager case studies are about firms that switched. 5plus Architects never had to. The founding directors had used Ideagen's Mail Manager at previous firms and carried it over when they started their own practice. It has been part of the infrastructure since day one, scaling from a handful of founders to 55 staff and from one office to two locations across more than a decade.
The challenge
The Great Eastern Street Hotel in London, the Montcalm on City Road Roundabout with its optical illusion-inspired facade, illustrates what a long project correspondence trail looks like. The first sketch was drawn in September 2011. The project reached site in April 2014 after three to four years of design development, with completion in September 2019.
That timeline produced 5,438 emails before site and 43,309 emails during construction: subcontractors, contractors, clients, planners, building control and fire safety. The best part of 50,000 emails for a single project, all stored in the job folder. 3.3GB pre-site, 31.6GB on site. As Adam Thornton, Founding Director, puts it: "All the drawings, all the letters, all the emails all sit together in one place."
When the project completed, the entire folder moved to cold storage. That 34.9GB is no longer consuming active server space, inflating Microsoft 365 costs or sitting in nightly backup tapes. If a legal challenge arises 12 years later, everything is there. As Adam puts it: "If I ever had to come back in 12 years' time with some sort of legal challenge, where were the emails, where were the letters, where were the drawings? All together in one place."
The results
At 5plus, filing emails is treated with the same importance as learning the drawing standards or the alarm code. It is part of the induction process, documented in the firm's ISO 9001 quality assurance system with how-to guides available to all staff. Mailboxes are kept intentionally lean: if you want to keep sending emails, keep your inbox manageable. The advice to staff is simple: file everything.
Resistance has been virtually non-existent. The search function is what Adam values most. Multiple filters can be combined: sender, recipient, subject, body text, attachments, file names and file types. As Adam describes it, it is "Google fast."
The social map feature visualizes all contacts on a project, color-coded by communication volume. When a client claims they have never heard from the firm, one click shows every person in the organization who has emailed them. When someone in a legal situation claims they were never sent information, the map shows who was in touch, who passed it on and how far removed the correspondence was from the person asking.