Email failure is costing UK businesses £1bn a year, according to research published this week.

The average UK organisation employing more than 200 staff experiences four email failures a year, each lasting at least half a day.

According to research conducted by Winmark on behalf of security vendor CipherTrust, a day of email downtime costs an average £68,000, damaging productivity and company reputation.

'Email has become a window into your business. If email doesn't work, what else doesn't?' said David Stanley, European managing director of CipherTrust.

Downtime is being caused by a combination of viruses and spam pouring into businesses, and a lack of employee understanding of how to deal with the problems.

Stanley says education is a shared responsibility of IT, business, and government. 'The industry has a responsibility to teach users, but this cannot be done in isolation,' he said.

'Businesses need to accept and understand the impact email downtime can have, but government needs to be involved as well.

'The government has its targets on having people online and it is the government's responsibility to push education on the risks that go with it.'