When Intel acknowledged two weeks ago that it may have lost months worth of e-mails involving about 100 employees, including top executives, the legendary Silicon Valley company seemed caught off-guard. Experts wondered how a $35 billion corporation. The answer may be surprising: Outside of heavily regulated industries like financial services and health care, most companies do a poor job of managing their e-mail.

Unless a business buys software to archive and categorize messages ahead of time, executives run the risk of being ill-prepared when their firm gets hauled into court or receives a government subpoena. At that point it may be too late - firms are often forced to retrieve and turn over thousands of e-mails from disparate backup disk and tape systems, sometimes at a cost of millions of dollars.

“Right now, the majority of companies are aware of the problem and that they need [this software]. But the majority haven’t deployed it yet,” said Masha Khmartseva, an analyst at the Radicati Group in Palo Alto. She estimates that as many as one-quarter of public companies in Silicon Valley lack any kind of e-mail archiving system.