Nationwide Building Society believes it will save thousands of pounds by using compression technology on its e-mail systems.

Roy Wilson, senior systems specialist at Nationwide, said that he was aiming to have a return-on-investment ratio as high as 36:1 on the compression system he was building.

"We believe that there will be significant savings in staff time, less frequent network bandwidth upgrades and lower storage costs," Wilson said.

He selected MaX Compression software for the project, which will affect more than 12,000 users between Nationwide's head office and more than 700 high-street branches and other distributed office locations.

"More than 10 per cent of our e-mails contain an attachment, which takes a significant amount of bandwidth away from the rest of the network," Wilson said.

In selecting which technology to use, Wilson wanted users to be unaware they were compressing their e-mails.

"In our experience, even those users which do know how to compress files often don't bother. With MaX Compression, the e-mail administrator decides what gets compressed," he said.

MaX Compression utilises standard Zip technology but remains virtually invisible to the user, who needs no previous knowledge of how to zip or unzip a file.

The software is integrated into Nationwide staff's Microsoft Outlook browsers and configured to automatically compress and decompress e-mails.