Why does email complexity compound rather than scale in a straight line?
A single AEC project can generate an enormous volume of email on its own. Frederick Lefeve, Quantity Surveyor at Mercury Engineering, described one project that had produced 40,000 filed emails in five months - with three more years left to run. By completion, he expected "hundreds of thousands of emails."
Now multiply that by every other project your firm is running at the same time. Email complexity in AEC doesn't scale in a straight line as your portfolio grows. It compounds, because every additional project adds its own volume, its own team, and its own filing structure - all running in parallel, all needing to stay separate and searchable.
What breaks first as a firm takes on more concurrent projects?
The first thing to break is usually filing consistency. A single project team can maintain a rough filing discipline through familiarity - everyone roughly knows where things go. Once a firm is running 10, 50, or 200 projects simultaneously, that informal discipline doesn't transfer. Different project teams develop different habits. New starters don't know which convention to follow. And when someone needs to find an email that could be filed one of several ways depending on who filed it, search becomes a guessing game.
The second thing to break is search itself. Outlook search works within a single inbox. It has no concept of "show me every email across every team related to Project X" - and even within a single project, if the relevant email was received by a colleague rather than you, native search can't find it at all.
How does filing volume actually scale with project count?
Filing volume scales with headcount as much as project count. Across the anonymised filing data behind Ideagen Mail Manager, a typical mid-size AEC practice files a median of around 260 emails per user, per month. For a 40-person team running several concurrent projects, that's over 100,000 emails filed in a year - and that's before accounting for the kind of single-project volume Mercury Engineering experienced.
The scale problem isn't hypothetical. It's the default state of a busy AEC firm, and it gets worse every time a new project starts without a corresponding increase in filing discipline.
What actually holds up at scale?
The firms that manage this well don't rely on more rigorous training or stricter policy as their project count grows. They rely on filing that happens automatically, at the point an email is sent or received, regardless of which project it belongs to or who's handling it.
Mail Manager's machine learning identifies the correct project folder for each email based on patterns learned across your firm's entire filing history, not just the current user's habits. That means a 200-project portfolio doesn't require 200 different manual conventions - the system carries the correct destination with it, project by project, as volume grows.
Search works the same way in reverse. Because every project's correspondence is filed centrally rather than scattered across individual inboxes, a search across "every email on Project X" returns a complete answer regardless of who sent or received any individual message.
Ideagen Mail Manager supports over 50,000 users across 2,500+ firms worldwide.
See how Mail Manager files project emails as they're sent
Frequently asked questions
Does email management get harder as an AEC firm takes on more projects?
Yes, and not in a straight line. Each additional concurrent project adds its own volume, team, and filing habits, so the complexity compounds rather than scales evenly.
How many emails does a typical AEC project generate?
Volume varies widely, but individual projects can generate tens of thousands of emails within months. Mercury Engineering, for example, filed 40,000 emails in five months on one project, with three years still to run.
Why does Outlook search fail once a firm runs multiple concurrent projects?
Outlook search is limited to a single inbox and can't search across a whole project team's correspondence, or find an email that a colleague received rather than you. It has no concept of project-wide search.
How do firms keep filing consistent across many project teams?
By removing reliance on individual habits. Automatic filing at the point an email is sent or received, guided by machine learning rather than manual convention, keeps filing consistent regardless of which project team is involved.
Does filing volume scale with team size or project count?
Both. A typical mid-size AEC practice files a median of around 260 emails per user per month, so filing volume rises with headcount as well as with the number of concurrent projects being run.