The True Cost of Spam

Spam is certainly a nuisance. It clutters your mail box, makimg the important stuff harder to find. It causes you to miss out on something that may be important, and perhaps to delete “good” email because you are unsure as to its origins. Everything become suspect when you are a victem of spam.

To business, the cost is higher and more serious. A study done a short time ago revealed that the cost to email users exceeds 22 Billion dollrs annually. A very real cost.

Here are some of the implications of spam on your organization.

Hardware resources. This includes both your email servers and your network infrastructure. With upwards of 70% of mail on some large corporation’s email server being unwanted mail, this is a significant drain. It slows down mail delivery for important business mail, and requires industry to add more equipment and faster networks.

User time. Spam takes two forms. The first is the annoying penny stock advertisements, or the cheap drugs or herbal medications. These have been sent without being requested by the user.

The second is the unwanted mail received because at one time you asked to see the demo video of a product you were interested in. And now, these guys are your pen pals.

They are both unrequested mail, but many a user will open them, see what they contain, and maybe even read a couple. So even though they weren’t requested, they eat up precious employee time.

Employees willalso lose time looking for emails that may have accidentally slipped into a junk folder and for reviewing junk folders for “good” mail.

Viruses. With spam arriving at the users desktop, you have increased the risk of a virus coming with it. I have seen too many users being duped by subjecttitles, opening mail from people they don’t know, only to find out later tthey have infected the network. Your last hope after that is for an effective virus checker.

The cost of cleaning up is enormous once the virus is out of the bag.

The IT shop may have people dedicated to keeping filters up to date, verifying security, reading about the latest worm attempts. New products need to be purchased and upgraded to keep the filters current. All at cost to the organization.