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Strangling the Internet: Why Spam Matters and What It Costs
Written by: Linda JacobsonArticle Overview: More than 70% of all e-mails are spam - that's 53.8 trillion per year! Spam is projected to cost $130 billion worldwide in 2009. The major cost to individual businesses is lost productivity through employees' time spent reviewing spam or searching for lost e-mails. This article looks at the cost of spam to businesses and reports that quarantining suspected spam costs 62% less than aggressive deleting policies. This topic is the third in our 2009 whitepaper series: "Making every IT dollar count!" The full whitepapers are available on our website.
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Strangling the Internet: Why Spam Matters and What It Costs
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.
Article Tags: ails, bandwidth, computer viruses, productivity, research groups, servers, spam filter, spam filters, spam stats, storage, technical solutions, trillion, user education
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About the Author: Linda Jacobson RSS for Linda's articles - Visit Linda's website 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!" Click here to visit Linda's website 16 Best Business BlackBerry Applications Extended Warranties Sensible Insurance or Waste of Money Strangling the Internet Why Spam Matters and What It Costs The Economics of EMail BlackBerry and Outlook Tips |
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