Strangling the Internet: Why Spam Matters and What It Costs

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What does spam cost?

The main cost of spam to businesses is lost productivity, mainly attributable to time spent reviewing spam. Other costs are due to lost or delayed e-mails, viruses transmitted through spam, anti-spam technology, and extra support, storage and bandwidth.

The total cost of spam to companies is estimated by research groups to be about $750 per user per year. User education to help employees handle spam more efficiently may save more than technical solutions.

Delete or quarantine?

Spam filters can delete e-mails before they reach the end user, or quarantine suspected spam e-mails in a separate mailbox that can be reviewed. There's often heated debate about how ails in a separate mailbox that can be reviewed. There's often heated debate about how aggressive a spam filter's settings should be.

It takes 62% more time to track down missing or deleted legitimate e-mails than to review quarantined e-mails. Lost e-mails can also be very costly in terms of missed meetings or lost opportunities.

Based on these facts, a less aggressive spam filter that quarantines e-mails is preferable to one that aggressively deletes suspected spam.

Scary spam stats

In 2008, spam made up 70% of all e-mails sent - 53.8 trillion a year or 101 per user per day.

Only about 20% of all e-mails originate from known legitimate servers.

Spam is predicted to cost $130 billion worldwide in 2009.

Most computer viruses are now designed to hijack computers to send out spam - turning them into so-called spambots.

Up to 25% of computers (150 million plus) could be bots.

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About the Author: Linda Jacobson

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Linda Jacobson is Partner and General Manager at Nash Networks Inc. We provide computer support and managed IT services to businesses in Toronto and the GTA. Our clients are usually from 5-50 employees and often have complex IT needs and low tolerance for downtime. We manage several mixed Windows, Mac and/or Linux or UNIX networks. We are producing a series of articles in 2009 to educate business owners about IT, with a focus on costs, productivity, and cost-effectiveness. The series is titled, "Making every IT dollar count!"
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