The average professional services worker spends over four hours a day on email, according to a McKinsey Global Institute analysis. For structural engineers at small practices, the number is probably higher. Most of what you do gets initiated, communicated, revised, and approved through email.
That's not a problem in itself. Email works. But when every project-related email sits in a shared inbox, or in Outlook folders that made sense when someone set them up, then 'finding the email from the building control officer about the revised steel section' becomes a 15-minute job instead of a 30-second one. Do that three times a week and you've lost 90 minutes of time you could have billed.
What actually happens to your project emails
Someone starts a project. They create a folder in Outlook. Or they don't, and the emails accumulate in the main inbox with the project name somewhere in the subject line. A new team member joins two months in. They have no email history. So they ask the project lead, who forwards relevant threads, which means the new person has half the context, selected by whoever decided what was relevant at the time.
A client asks a question. The answer is in an email from six weeks ago. You search. You find three emails with similar subjects. You open them. The one you want is the third, buried in a chain of twelve replies. Fifteen minutes, at least.
Nobody designed this system. It just happened. Most firms run their entire project communication history through an inbox built for personal correspondence, not for project records.
The compliance dimension
Under the Building Safety Act 2022 and the revised CDM Regulations, structural engineering firms working on higher-risk buildings have documented responsibilities as principal designers. That means correspondence with clients, architects, contractors, and building control isn't just useful, it's evidence.
If a regulator or insurer asks for the instruction that led to a design change on a project from two years ago, 'I think it's somewhere in email' is not an answer. The Building Safety Regulator's guidance expects dutyholders to maintain accessible records throughout the project lifecycle. An inbox is not an accessible record.
Even for lower-risk residential work, the practical risk is real. Disputes over scope, fee, and responsibility almost always come down to email correspondence. If you can't produce that correspondence quickly, your position in a dispute is weaker than it should be.
Why search doesn't solve this
Most email clients have decent search. You can usually find an email if you know roughly what you're looking for. But search is reactive. It requires you to know you're looking for something.
The project record problem is different. It's about having a complete, organised view of a project's communication history without having to search for it. When you bring a new engineer onto a project, you want them to open the project record and see everything relevant: the initial brief, the structural calculations, the building control queries, the fee approval, the site visit notes. Not hunt for it piece by piece across two email inboxes and a shared drive.
What email-in-the-project actually means
There's a specific difference between 'email integrated into your project management tool' and 'your email client has a sidebar.' The latter is a shortcut to your inbox. The former means email correspondence is automatically associated with the project it belongs to, visible to anyone working on that project, and stored as part of the project record, not as a separate stream of data.
When a client emails about a project, that email goes to your Gmail or Outlook as normal. But it also appears in the project record in your platform, alongside the drawings, the calculations, the invoices, and the previous correspondence. Nobody has to file it. Nobody has to remember to copy it across. It's there.
When someone new joins the project, they open the project record and see the full history. Not half of it. All of it.
The practical difference
A firm we spoke to recently lost a fee dispute because they couldn't quickly produce the email where a client had approved an expanded scope. The email existed. They found it, eventually, about an hour before the meeting where the dispute was being discussed. They won. But they spent the morning searching for evidence that should have been findable in under a minute.
That's the cost of treating email as correspondence rather than as project documentation. Not catastrophic, usually. But expensive, and avoidable.
One Uncle integrates Gmail and Outlook natively. Emails are assigned to projects automatically based on sender and context. The project record includes the full email history alongside every other document and note. On the Building Safety Act point: if you're working on any higher-risk residential or commercial project, that complete record isn't just convenient, it's required.
