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Strangling the Internet: Why Spam Matters and What It Costs

Written by: Linda Jacobson

Article 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.

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.

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Article Tags: ails, bandwidth, computer viruses, productivity, research groups, servers, spam filter, spam filters, spam stats, storage, technical solutions, trillion, user education



Related Forum Posts
I developed a personal tool - Institute for Marketecology, the flood of gets rich quick schemes and Spam has made a lot of people equate the term with unethical behavior. Fortunately, there are plenty ethical people out there using honest Internet marketing techniques to counteract this.
Re: Adobe Flex Developer Team need sales agents in US - This is purely advertising, it should be regarded as a Spam.
Re: A lot of electronics spam today! - Haha... great thread here, guys. Nice name, Michelle, I think that would suit very well. I wonder just how many websites and forums could benefit from a service like this. Anyone ever look into it? Spam is a serious problem for many, many people. I imagine there are those who would be willing to pay for a service to get rid of the never-ending nightmare.
Re: Building Links By Spamming Forums - Hi Paul, I agree that it is legitimate to use forums to promote your business, and to promote your business in as many forums as possible. One of the problems with spam posting is that the spammer is not interested in giving anything back to the forum community where he or she posts. Spam messages are almost always badly written and very generalized; they fail to contribute anything to the conversation and they are often completely irrelevant.
Re: 4 Home Based Opportunities For 2011 - Hi, Thanks, for sharing these value information with us. Internet make easy us to earn money even at home. Internet offers a lot of opportunities to earn money. Internet Marketing is the biggest example of money making.


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