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How spam costs your company money
Category: General
In 2001, the European Commission reported that spam cost businesses $14 billion worldwide. During subsequent years, the cost has risen considerably. Ferris Research estimates that spam will cost businesses $35 billion in 2007. And that’s only in the US. Globally, the cost will be approximately $100 billion, according to Ferris. Why is spam costing businesses so much more than in previous years? Because there’s so much more spam, that’s why. Today, more than 50 billion emails are sent each and every day – and more than 50% of those emails are spam. Email systems are, quite simply, being inundated with a completely unprecedented volume of spam. And so are the users of those email systems.
To delete a spam only takes a couple of seconds, so it cannot be too much of a problem, right? No, wrong. The cost of spam is frequently underestimated in this manner. While the impact of a handful of spams may well be negligible, the impact of tens or hundreds of thousands of spams will invariably be considerable. To quantify the exact cost of spam is impossible. Some costs will depend on what, if any, antispam solution has been deployed, some will depend on the business environment and others simply cannot be quantified. There is, however, absolutely no doubt that spam costs each and every internet-connected business money. Some of the costs associated with spam are obvious and fairly well-known. Many people will have seen documents that explain how, if it takes a user X number of seconds to delete a spam and if that user receives Y numbers of spams a day, he’ll spend Z number of hours during the course of a year dealing with spam. Similarly, many people will have encountered material that explains spam’s impact on bandwidth and storage costs. Both sets of costs are very real – spam can indeed have a significant impact on both staff productivity and the infrastructure.
False positives impact productivity too. A high rate of false positives will result in staff having to expend time carefully checking their deleted or quarantined items to look for misidentified emails. The recovery of such emails can also be a time consuming exercise – especially as some antispam solutions require staff to review quarantined items using a cumbersome web-based system. And time is, of course, money. According to Ferris Research, it costs $3.50 to recover an erroneously deleted email. That may seem like an insignificant amount, but in a company with 1,000 staff, a single misidentified email per month per member of staff equates to an annual cost of $42,000.
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