A recent international study commissioned by Mimecast found that 79 per cent of people send work emails from their personal email accounts, with 1 in 5 saying they do this on a regular basis, creating email archiving issues for compliance.

The "Generation Gmail" study investigated how attitudes to work email use are evolving and how progressive employers are managing this core communication channel.

It found that while email management is made more difficult when users circumvent email archiving by using third party email providers, balancing the different generations is key. .

The study found that education has a big role to play; and that IT departments are failing to embrace the younger generations of employees for whom social media has affected the way they balance work and life together, and consequently the way they want to use corporate email to do their jobs in a productive and flexible way