Getting project email under control
A practical guide for construction teams, built on Davis Construction's journey
Some projects accumulated as many as 300,000 emails. Some subfolders held thirty or forty thousand messages each. For more than a decade, Davis Construction - a general contractor with close to 600 employees - ran project correspondence through Outlook public folders, with no firm-wide standard for how anything got organized inside them.
Finding a specific email meant guessing which folder it might be in. If the guess was wrong, the alternative was searching hundreds of thousands of items in Outlook and waiting. This guide walks through how Davis Construction fixed it - and how you can, without starting from zero.
What you'll gain
Why folder structure breaks down at scale
The real reason "everyone organizes their own subfolders" stops working once projects, teams and years start piling up.
The Davis Construction story
How a decade of unmanaged public folders grew to over 10 terabytes of project email, and where it stopped being manageable.
How Ideagen Mail Manager fixed it, project by project
Filing to one agreed location, migrating historical archives without losing history and how deduplication cut one project's email roughly in half.
A practical rollout order
The five-step approach Davis Construction used to go from one project to a fully migrated archive, including what to expect from employee adoption.