The rising prevalence of freemail is driving change across the enterprise email market. And the simple fact is that a single user  identity as opposed to a single corporate identity may provide the best long-term solution for email management both within and outside the public sector. When it comes to "corporate email accounts" there are some people that need it and some that don't.  With corporates beginning to embrace a corporate and non-corporate mail strategy, governments should look to leverage a high-impact approach that encompasses a mandated generic domain standard (i.e. @government.gov.au) for those who need corporate email, and freemail (@hotmail, @gmail, @yahoo etc) for those that don't. 

Whereas email used to be easy when it was simply POP, there is now a significant cost to managing email changes in any organisation. For governments, that cost is considerable because while many public servants remain in the service for a lifetime, they actually move around from agency to agency, cluster to cluster and often jurisdiction to jurisdiction. Each move often requires a change and that change most often involves a new email identity.

For many workers within the public service email is simply used by management as a broadcast tool by which they receive notifications. As such, many "service" or "transient" workers such as those working in service centres with shared terminals probably don't require access to a corporate account. As highlighted in Australian Enterprise Email Market why should Centrelink continue to provide corporate accounts to thousands of customer service centre staff or temporary employees and deal with the policy and privacy issues which are generated by corporate email account management?