Slashdot Mirror
What Is The Real Cost of Spam?
securitas writes "The NY Times has a nice feature about the diverging estimates of the costs of spam (Google). The estimates vary widely from $10 billion to $87 billion per year for American workers, and even more for global costs. Critics say that research firms' estimates vastly overstate the actual cost of spam. Public institutions like Indiana University have to be sensitive to the First Amendment rights of the spammers. And at companies like Nortel Networks, security architect Chris Lewis says that the real economic burden is the 10 to 15 percent - 5,000 to 10,000 messages a day - of the spam that still gets through, which costs the company about $1 in lost productivity per message. The costs can be much higher if a top executive is upset or mad about spam. "If someone in senior management gets spammed," Mr. Lewis said, "it could take 20 or 30 hours of everyone's time, up and down the chain." A chart of the per user amount of spam and the time spent processing it, as well as the varying estimates of the per user cost of spam are included in the article."
That's not the fault of spam- that's the fault of whiny executives. Execs are always whining about efficiency, "making the sacrifice", cutting the fat...yet they're responsible for more productivity loss for most IT departments than other employees combined.
When 2-3 execs moved into the office I was supporting, they were a massive drain, killing my productivity- because any time even the slightest thing was wrong, we had to drop what we were doing, and rush to make the Big Baby happy.
Executives, hear this. One sure fire way to enhance the productivity of your IT staff is to learn how to use your #$!@ing email program, not complain when your desktop is the wrong color, learn how to back up your data, and don't make us run in circles on your bloody little pet projects. Don't even get me started about personal printers/fax machines.
Please help metamoderate.
A number of people have responded "But I can delete spam really fast" etc.
claiming that the costs quoted seem way to high. What they don't estimate is
the full cost within an organization of dealing with a problem like spam which
is greatly increased by a number of factors:
1. Management get annoyed by spam and see it as a drain on their team's
time and want to do something about it: that costs time there for them---
because they are thinking about spam and not making widget X---and the IT
department of the company who has to respond to the manager's questions re:
what are we doing about this problem?
2. Not all employees are as sophisticated as the Slashdot crowd (can't believe
I said that) and so for them spam is a far greater time sink (== $$$). They
start wondering why they got the spam (especially when it's pornographic) and
wonder if they did something wrong or if someone is going to "find out". While
they think about spam they are not working.
3. Spam is a workplace nuisance for the HR department because offensive material
that enters the workplace becomes the employer's problem when people go to HR
to say that the employer should "do something" about the offensive material
(after all an employer would "protect" its employees from a calendar of nude
women or a harrassing coworker). More $$ spent in the time to complain and HR
doing something about it.
4. And finally there's the IT guy who bears the brunt trying to fight the battle
against spam when he's got plenty of other stuff to do. And so he buys expensive
software to deal with the problem. More $$ spent on his time and the software and
maintaining the software.
It's just a little more complicated than "can't people just delete the stuff". Even
people who say "just get tool XYZ" overlook the cost of deploying (to 1000s of
desktop machines), training employees (to use the thing) and maintaining it. That's
a very expensive proposition.
John.
Some older people do not understand spam. I found my boss replying with individual, very professional messages to the spammers. His assistant, who is not as old as my boss, caught on and then went to me for help about it. She knew what spam was, but did not know how to deal with it.