The Time Matters® email management system does many things very well, including managing emails in both a matter-centric and contact-centric database, where everyone can view all the emails regarding a particular contact or matter, in addition to documents, phone calls, notes, etc., and far exceeds the leading email programs in this regard. There can be too much of a good thing, however. Saving Time Matters email with attachments can be problematic if the volume is great, and/or the size of the attachments is large.

The widely-accepted best practice is to TMSave all Time Matters email attachments (both incoming and outgoing), and then delete the attachments, to keep the attachment table from growing out of control. A large number of attachments increases the size of the database, much more so than data records, which slows response time and increases the possibility of data corruption caused by network or hardware problems.

In the real world, attachments are rarely TMSaved because users are busy putting out the latest "fire." Even if users were trained today to TMSave attachments properly in the future, it would take a substantial amount of time to TMSave all of the existing email attachments that most firms have accumulated. This is particularly true of sent emails, from which users rarely if ever go back and strip off attachments, that are often duplicates of the documents already saved to disk elsewhere.