A project to help Luton Borough Council get to grips with the flood of emails through its servers has enabled the local authority to reduce its spend on bandwidth and divert the savings to front-line services.

The council wanted to introduce an email archiving system to help it gain a BS77999 security standard accreditation, as well as to comply with forthcoming record management rules under the Freedom of Information Act.

But since going live with the management system the council has seen its daily number of emails drop by a fifth, from 25,000 to 20,000.

At a time when the number of email addresses the council uses has risen from 2,200 to 3,350, the system has puts in place limits on the number of personal emails staff can send, cutting traffic further.

"This has cut out storage costs, our back-up costs and our bandwidth costs," said Chris Kadwill, IT manager at Luton Borough Council. "We've been able to plough those savings back into council services."

The email management system, Enterprise Vault by KVS, introduced automatic archiving and log generating, which clears out inboxes while making it easier to retrieve emails.

The system also prevents the council from keeping information longer than necessary, by destroying emails when required.

"It allows us to make sure we only keep the data we absolutely need. This helps us establish a good record management system while being cost effective," said Kadwill.