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."
here
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
Well, yes, since the CEO needs to ask his assistant to ask a senior manager to ask the Spam Control Committee to ask a freshly-hired sysadmin to fucking hit his goddamn delete key. All that and more for just $50 million a year, plus golden parachute!
...which costs the company about $1 in lost productivity per message.
Where can I find a job where I get paid $1 every time I press the delete button? I'll fax in my resume' right away!
Or has this been calculated in the same way that they calculate money lost from 'piracy' and 'hacking'?
I can certainly see how spam costs real money in terms of bandwidth and all, but I'm wondering whether they actually did some research or just guessed.
This
I don't like wading through Spam... too gooey and greasy.
503 Sig Unavailable
The Signature could not be accessed. Please try again later or contact the administrator
Either I'm a spam processing machine, or some of these estimates are WAY overstated. After running through two filters, I end up only seeing 20 TO 40 spam's a day, and it takes me all of 20 or 30 seconds to deal with them - for the WHOLE DAY. Do these people keep their delete key in their drawer or what?
And the person quoted about the cost of setting up spam filters and following up on incorrect filtering seems to ignore the fact that the effort for this person to do this is spread across all the users... thousands of them (or tens or hundreds of thousands, in this case).
Marc
-- PGP keyID: 0x4C95994D
how do they figure $1/msg? It maybe only takes me 10 seconds to alt-tab over to outlook and see that it's spam, delete it, and alt-tab back. let's see... that amounts to $360/hr! I wish I were making that kind of money! If it weren't for all this spam...
if they'd just get spambayes they wouldn't have this problem anymore. hardly any junk mail gets past spambayes...
for now,we have to live with it (or with what gets through our filters).
"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."
In other words, stop whining and hit delete.
DO NOT WRITE IN THIS SPACE
okThe real issue about costs of spam is not what it costs today, but what it costs a year, two or 5 years from now, if it's not killed today.
The volume of spam is increasing exponentially. It will reach a point when it will start choking up Email entirely.
At that point it's too late.
Proletariat of the world, unite to kill spammers. Remember to shoot knees first, so that they can't run away while you slowly torture them to death
In Soviet Russia, I ruled you
Sift through hundreds, sometimes thousands of messages a day searching for legitimate technical support issues
Only accept email from addresses belonging to customers on file.
This has had a detrimental effect, and we often do get calls from customers saying their emails never got through and that they need to know which of their email addresses is on the account because they don't remember. This is inconvenient, and these measures may have led to the loss of a few customers for us. This isn't terrible, however, compared to spending hours a day sifting through spam, which would probably cost us more than the customers we lost.
This is still unacceptable.
Spam has cost me over $10,000, and my dick STILL isn't any bigger.
I wonder about the effectivity of Spam because I just chuck it all. I can't remember a single time I clicked on a spam email. Nobody I know gets any spam that's worthwhile in any regard.
I just read James Cramer's bio and he talks about how TheStreet.com did a bulk mailing that they paid $500,000 for it. End result? 5 subscribers. $100,000 per subscriber. That's a terrible conversion rate for junk mail. Now I know that was junk mail, not spam email, but I simply can't imagine the rates being all that much better for Spam.
I'd say one way to fight spam is have a "do not spam" registry ... like what's being done with telemarketers.
A good study must take into account more than the original purchase price. How much productivity is lost due to increased bathroom breaks? How much was the environment damaged by the flatulence of whatever animal (?) it was that the Spam was made from? How much does Spam consumption increase the burden on the healthcare system? If Spam is allowed to reach a corporate executive during lunch or dinner, one could easily see how 20-30 hours of subordinates' time could be spent on the problem, perhaps even resulting in someone's termination and the corresponding costs of finding a replacement.
Clearly total cost of Spam is much higher than, say, a nice serving of fish.
paintball
That's not the fault of spam- that's the fault of whiny executives. Execs are always whining about efficiency, "making the sacrifice", cutting the fat...yet they're responsible for more productivity loss for most IT departments than other employees combined.
When 2-3 execs moved into the office I was supporting, they were a massive drain, killing my productivity- because any time even the slightest thing was wrong, we had to drop what we were doing, and rush to make the Big Baby happy.
Executives, hear this. One sure fire way to enhance the productivity of your IT staff is to learn how to use your #$!@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.
Since most, if not virtually all spam is commercial in nature, it is not protected by the First Amendment. Kind of like the whiny telemarketers suing the FCC -- nobody has a "right" to try and sell me anything, thanks. And use of a recipient-pays delivery model removes them even more from the collective good graces of everyone trying to wade out from under the deluge. So screw the bogus legal pretext and lets get on with some gruesome public executions.
In other news, astrophysicists have announced that they now know what all that dark matter is: it's stupidity.
It could be that cost is the wrong focus. Advertising the lack of benefits might deter spammers. By now most people have a knee-jerk reaction to delete the stuff before ever seeing what's in it; therefore, it stands to reason that the cost of paying someone to send ads anonymously may now outweigh the payback. Posting some hard stats on that might get organizations to send less spam, or pay spammers less money, or fire some spammers - all of which could result in less spam.
"Microsoft killed my company, I hold a personal grudge. I don't use Microsoft products and neither should you."-JWZ
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.
But yes, execs do sometimes need handholding. Years ago, while I was still doing sysadmin, the head of one of the neighboring departments would ask me for help when his Mac wouldn't print. Hey, I was a Unix guy, not a Mac guy, though if they'd gotten me a Mac I'd have been quite happy - but 95% of the time it was a matter of rebooting the network printer frob a couple of times and it'd work....
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Wow. Marriage sure has changed you, CmdrTaco!
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
To: CEO
From: John Smith
Subject: V*I*A*G*R*A
To: CEO
From: Your Buddy
Subject: Are you feeling a little less than you could be?
Now let's take a poll. How long wold it take for most of you to figure out this is Spam? How many of you would approach the 10 second mark for deleting both of these? If you are, then you have a slow trigger finger.
Everybody dies frustrated and sad and that is beautiful
That's also true for ISPs - web traffic carries a lot more bits than spam, and while spam email probably outnumbers real email by byte-count as well as message count, it's not really a big deal for connectivity-provider ISPs. (Email-specialist ISPs are obviously another case entirely.) On the other hand, the worker-time cost of handling spam complaints and trying to keep filters up to date is more important than the cost of the bits.
Almost all email programs let you display the sender and subject without opening the message. 90% of the time it's pretty easy to tell just from reading those whether to delete it without opening - filters can often trash many of those messages automatically, but they can also speed up the decision time by marking suspicious messages.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Funny thing is that Viruses actually cost more than spam, yet these folks are worrying about spam.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Anybody who says otherwise is BULLSHITTING.
The first amendment talks about Freedom of speech - freedom of the press. Nowhere does it permits anyone from using someone else's press, as spamming does by using someone else's computer/network ressources.
Public institutions like Indiana University have to be sensitive to the First Amendment rights of the spammers.
First Amendment rights do not apply to spam. First, let's look at just the communication aspect of it. Spam is not directed at an individual per se, but at a list of millions of people. The fact is, though, that individuals DO receive it personally. It is in their face, staring at them from their mailbox. This is not a soapbox preacher that you can just walk away from; we are forced to deal with it on a personal level, at our own expense. The First Amendment guarantees "Free Speech", not a "forced audience".
Now, let's look at the content side of spam. It has been determined repeatedly that the First Amendment is not protection for unproven claims, scams, or lack of "truth in advertising". Companies and individuals who have parlayed these things into First Amendment cases have invariably lost.
If a person or company wishes to advertise to me, they may do so. Advertising, historically, is at the expense of the company, not the consumer.
When I get spam from an open relay, with forged headers, bad return info, and base64 encoded, exactly how much do they think I'm going to spend on their product? Exactly how seriously do they think I'll take them?
The answer is: I take them very seriously indeed. Not for any reason that they hope for, however. I CAN and WILL pursue them, catch them, and put them under the brightest light that I can find.
Because, I am a spammerhunter.
I disagree with this positive outlook on spam. Technically, Dr. Fader is right: the infrastructure grows because spam forces it to do so.
This is not productive growth to me, it's just fat. One needs more bandwidth and processing capability to manage spam. This capacity could be used for other avenues, or the money spent someplace else. This is bad economics - something along the lines of the broken window fallacy.
I do think spammers have made us think smarter about email (a good thing), but we have paid for that in many ways. There are no net gains here - at least not from my perspective.
I'm pulling these numbers partly from my experience and partly from my ass.
Average user at work receives ~ 10 spam messages per day, with our spam filters catching 80%, so the user receives 2 per day.
I figure you can classify spam messages into 3 types which require varying amount of effort to determine when to delete them.
First, you have obvious spam that can be deleted by reading the subject. I figure that 25% that get though spam filters are this type. Let's say they require 5 seconds to read/delete.
Second type requires the user opening the message and reading the contents. Let's say 70% are this type and require 15 seconds.
The last type are the ones that confuse users or they think they are legit. These are the messages that users will reply to, talk to their coworkers about, or forward to IS to be verified. This would be the remaining 5% and require 5 minutes (300 seconds) of time.
With those numbers, the users spend 27 seconds per message or 54 seconds per day.
Per year, that is 5.475 hours. If the average cost of a user (pay + benefits) is $30/hour then the annual cost for spam per user is $164.25/year or $0.225/spam.
Now, we are running spam software in this situation. Figure that the spam software cost $10/user/year in licensing, and an additional $10/user/year in hardware or administrative costs. I'm also assuming that the spam load on our mail servers is minimal enough that the costs involved there are insignificant.
That puts the total now at $184.25/year. However, without antispam software, that total would sky rocket to $821.25/year since the user would have to deal with 5x the spam. Of course, this may be high since there will probably a larger percentage of those 5-seconds-to-delete messages.
About the only interesting thing about these BS numbers is that the lower one ($184) is close to Ferris Research's estimate of $168/year; while the higher number ($821) is close to Nucleus Research's $874/year.
ÕÕ
Everyone must be adopting the RIAA method of calculating costs due to "illegal" actions.
Researchers: Hey, your company only makes $10 million net per year. How the hell are you claiming $1 billion in lost profit due to spam?
Company: Wha?? Look at the monkey! Look at the silly monkey...
Researchers: Oh, I see. $1 billion it is.
- I love animals. I try to eat at least one a day.
You can't legislate your way out of the spam mess. Read this: http://www.zeropath.com/bigbiz.html for an example of how Spam legislation will backfire on us all and only end up supporting Microsoft.
Next question?
-- Stamp out entropy. ->dryguy@bellsloth.net
"Spammers know they are going to be kicked off, so they won't pay their first few months' bill," said Craig Silliman, the legal director for MCI's network and facilities operation. "By the time you catch them, they turn into a net loss."
So, not only do they fail to act on SPAM reports, but they don't disconnect for failing to pay? What are they thinking? I mean, how long does it take to "catch" a SPAMMER on their own network?
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Now your mom doesn't want to check her mailbox at all anymore. But many people would just tell mom to call instead, since they no longer want to search for her letter amidst the toxic waste. And they certainly wouldn't send their kids down to stick their hand in the mailbox anymore with all those wrapped and unwrapped filthy needles.
People will stop wasting their time with email (as currently implemented), and thus this new form of communication will be strangled soon after its birth.
Just as commercials on television pay for the programming you get to enjoy, advertisements in email are there to defray the cost of the email infrastructure. If you don't take the time to read these short, unintrusive messages, advertisers will be unwilling to pay to advertise on the internet. Who then will pay for the email system you take for granted?
The evasion of commercial email is a serious ethical, moral, and legal issue. Users caught implementing "filters" to evade their responsibilities could face an expensive lawsuit or even jail time.
We as a society must learn to respect the copyrights and first amendment rights of bulk emailers, many of whom struggle to put food on the table for their families. To summarize:
1. Commercial email deletion is a serious moral and legal issue.
2. "Everyone does it" or "I didn't know it was illegal to filter spam" are not valid excuses.
3. Filter users could face an expensive lawsuit or even jail time. To avoid this threat, just delete all spam filtering software you may have installed on your computer.
4. We will not rest until this insidious form of electronic shoplifting is eradicated for good.
All of our plans have a minimum of 5 included email accounts. We're not cheapasses, we cater to small business and sites that go beyond what would be better off on Geocities where they started.
We do provide a web form, but the fact that 2% of our customers use it over the email-based system does indicate that what you're suggesting is inconvenient for customers. In fact, the only customers we seem to find using the web system are the ones who have web-based mail, such as Yahoo or Hotmail.
And I understand completely -- it's much easier to open up your email client and fire out an email to tech support in 15 seconds that says "OMG HELP ME I CANT GET TO ANY WEBSITES AND MY EMAIL ISENT WORKING!!!!!!1111one" than it is to open up your web browser, navigate to the user login page, log in with SSL, find the support link, then fill in your "issue" and send.
While I hate spam as much as the next person, we (Americans in this case) have to look at it from a more legal and governmental nature. While alot of us would chomp at the bit to outlaw spam, set fines and jailtime for spammers, you have to look at what that would do to the laws over the internet. It would set a precident stating that the governments of the world HAVE CONTROL OVER THE INTERNET. This is bad... very very bad.
First of all, the first thing that would come out the door after the anti-spam laws would be taxes. That's right, taxes on E-mail, taxes on webpage badnwidth, taxes on everything. Why have they not done this yet? Because the governments cannot establish that they have any ruling or administrating connection to the internet, therefore they cannot tax it. Once an internet law is passed, taxes will follow.
After taxes will come modified libel(slander) laws, court cases over websites (i.e.: he has an anti-gay site, I'm sueing!!), next maybe even such things over e-mail and the like.
Passing any internet-based law would open the door for the government to get its paws on the one truly unmoderated frontier left in the world. They futz with it enough as it is, do we really need that?
Thinking outside the box is so big now that doing so is really putting youself back in the box. There is no box.
What kind of BS is that? No they do not.
IU and other public institutions are NOT lawmakers, nor are they free public resources. Now if individual students are doing the spamming, there may be some complexities to deal with, especially if other students are the targets of the spam. But public schools are not a resource that anyone may just freely use.
If the school does make certain facilities open for public use, then they do have to do so fairly. That means, for example, if a facility like a stadium is used for a convention by members of the public (and usually these are done on a basis of school use has first priority, student use second priority, and public use last and usually paid), then spammers would probably have to be given equal access as members of the public. So you might see a spammer's convention meeting there.
The real issues are:
Does Kinkos have a right to post signs anywhere on school property to advertise their copying services to students? No! They must follow specific rules. There might be places designated for signs to be posted. The school newspaper might be advertising supported and Kinkos could buy ad space there. The school might even sell naming rights to the gymnasium to Kinkos (if they want to buy that). But there exists no free right for anyone, not even students or faculty, to come and commandeer any resource they wish for their own purposes.
Certainly this rules out students spamming the internet, and I would argue it also gives no one in the public any particular right to communicate with a student on the school's network, even if the student grants that permission by signing up for advertising. The school owns the property and it is generally well considered to not be public use property. The school is definitely not preventing people from using their own personal property/resources when that school restricts the ways the school's property/resources are used to be limited to what the mission of the school is.
It might be a whole different matter if a government entity were setting up a network, such as an open WiFi node, for anyone in the public to make use of. That is not what public institutions of higher learning do.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Well, if the spammers are costing more money than they are generating then they too are hurting the economy, and rules need to be made to regulate them.
The whole 'frea speach' issue is a red herring, used by spammers to make stupid people take pause before doing something.
The first amendment guarantees the right to say whatever you want, but it does not guarantee the right to use other people's resources to say it.
There is NO first amendment issue regarding spam.
Sure, spam has cost me a lot over the years, but if this deal comes through helping Mrs. Mariam Sese-Seko (widow of late president Mobuto Sese-Seko of Zaire) transfer her money out of the country, I'll have more than broke even!
I object to that article, and to the next reply.
If people would set up their email servers correctly, I could eliminate 99% of the spam from my systems. Unfortunately, a bunch of administrators seem to feel that they do not actually have to configure their systems correctly. If I want to be able to receive mail from them, then I need to open my server up and allow misconfigured servers to talk to it. Guess who has the majority of (usually intentionally) misconfigured servers. You guessed it, spammers.
Getting rid of spam is simple. Stop bitching about it and fix your own damned mail server.
Do you:
Just my two cents.
-sirket
The lost productivity due to spam is inconsequential compared to the lost productivity due to Slashdot.
http://yetanotherpoliticalrant.blogspot.com
Spammers are marketing parasites on services that we pay for. I have an email address so that people I want to hear from can send me messages, not so that I can receive unsolicited marketing.
In an ideal world, spammers could be sued for theft of services, or could be forced to subsidize the connectivity costs of the recipient. I wouldn't mind spam so much if each piece I received deposited $0.25 or so into my paypal account. I'd still filter it, but at least I'd be paid for my troubles.
Marketers are free to put up web sites, and even pay to advertise on other sites, but they don't have a right to blast everyone on the net with random garbage.
The First Amendment guarantees each American Freedom of expression. It does not guarantee that anyone has to listen to you.
It's amazing how many people are screaming:
"There's no way spam costs $1/message"
"It doesn't take me that long to hit the delete key."
[sarcasm]What an amazing, informative analysis[/sarcasm]
First off, they're probably figuring their cost as their take home pay. This is much too low.
Say I was to make around $25/hr. That says nothing about all the other hidden costs/tradeoffs going on. I could be making that much, but the corp. I work for could be billing for my time at a rate of $1000/day. If they have a substantial backlog of contracts, they basically are loosing out on that much money if I don't work for a day.
Now lets do some math. $1000/8hours = 125 dollars / hour * 1 hour / 60 min = $2.08 / minute
Say it takes me 15 seconds to open up outlook, see the message, realize it's spam, delete it, and go back to what I was doing. That's $.52 right there.
Then you have to add in other costs.
How much did/does it cost to store that email? How much did it cost to download it (including the gifs)? How much of your IT staff's time is devoted to reducing spam, upgrading mailservers, deleting old mail, backing up mail, etc? Is that email you just got from Hamza Kalu just spam, or an event that should be reported to corporate security? (Some businesses do have to worry about fraud/industrial espionage via forged email.) How much time did you spend thinking about that? Five seconds? Ten?
Is the spam clever enough to fool other, less tech savvy people? (I once recieved a fake email from BestBuy.com's fraud dept, the would be pretty convincing to someone who doesn't know much about conputers.) How much time do you spend warning them?
Spam is costing businesses a significant amout of money. It may cost less for some and more for others, but it seems some people have no idea how quickly the dollar signs add up when you're running a business. I know I have a tough time wrapping my brain around it.
Life is too short to proofread.
I can say that spam does cost. Many calls I get have me spending time walking clueless people through the steps necessary to enable the server-side spam filter and the client-side mail rules.
It doesn't end there, either. From what users are saying, it seems like spammers trade their mailing lists which cause users to recieve increasing amounts of spam. Some users complain that it takes too long to download the spam. I kindly remind them that not only does our mail server have to download the mail but also transmit the mail to them.
Figure you are on a bit of mailing lists, and you receive 500K of spam per day (some messages are html with images). The ISP has to use 1000k (say a megabyte) for that user. Multiply that by 4,000 users, and you have 4 GB of data transfer. Think of it as a T1 simultaneously using maximum up and down bandwidth for almost THREE HOURS.
That is not even mentioning the users who get on a billion mailing lists and never check their mail/delete their messages. Say (a conservative figure) 50 users got 500K of spam per day. That's almost 750 MB/month. 9 gigs of hard drive gone in the name of unread spam in a year. It all adds up folks.
Screw the Do-Not-Call list, I would rather have had a Do-Not-Email list _first_. When an occasional telemarketer calls my home or my workplace, there is a ~30 second distraction. End of story. Nothing like a day of 20 minute phone calls walking users through setting up spam filters and explaining to them why they get so much spam. Although my job is a part-time one, I figure around $150 in labor is paid by both parties per day (the ISP and customers) to set up a *workaround* (which sometimes isn't enough for high-volume victims of spam).
Take the cost of running a mail server. Hardware, upgrades, bandwidth, administration.
Multiply by 40-60%. This is the noise part of the signal-noise ratio that is e-mail. I'm sure you get the picture.
And that's if you don't even try to squelch the noise. Hardware and administration costs go up exponentially when you start diverting CPU time from sorting mail to filtering it.
Oh, and don't forget the problem is getting worse - exponentially.
It won't be long until 80-90% of the cost of running a mail server goes towards dealing with ads for things that would make the ACLU wish they hadn't fought the CDA. Now consider how much money Sprint spends on providing e-mail to their clients. And consider how Sprint would love to see 70-80% of that cost go away. I would imagine the next conservative administration would introduce legislation that would legalize the public flogging of spammers, just based on pressure from big business, nevermind the public.
"No problem. I have the capacity to do infinite work so long as you don't mind that my quality approaches zero."-Dilbert
It's really about a bunch of senior executive yes-men overreacting. Usually what happens is something like this:
Exec: "Oh look, somebody is trying to extend my member. I hate spam."
Assistant: (takes mental note and walks into a neighbouring execs office, usually somebody in IT, and says) "--insert head hancho's name-- is getting deluged with spam, it's a real problem. Could we have somebody come up here and do something?"
IT Exec: "That's unfortunate, I'll see what I can do"
IT Exec: (calls personal friend in technical support (kiss-ass middle management), chats about golf, the latest corporate results, a couple real business related things, and adds: --insert head hancho's name-- is having a real problem with Spam, can we do anything?
Kiss-ass middle managment: (calls lower management of tech support) "--insert head hancho's name-- has a critical presentation to do and their computer won't work anymore! Send somebody up there quick! I don't care what they're doing, this takes priority, this is --insert head hancho's name--!"
Lower management to techie(this response can really vary): "--insert head hancho's name--'s computer is messed up, I need you to pop up and have a look. --kiss assed middle management-- is very concerned, so this is unfotunately high profile."
Techie, calls Assistant: "What's up?"
Assistant: "We're being killed with spam, --insert head hancho's name-- is furious, get up here now!"
Techie to Exec: "Hello, --assistant-- says you're being killed with spam, do you have any of it left?"
Exec: "No, I deleted it, don't worry about it"
Techie: "Next time you get one, hang on to it and we might be able to do something about it. --spout summarized corporate spam policy--. Do you need anything else?"
Exec: "No, that's all for now, thanks."
...and the end result is that everyone it the IT department thinks that the top exec doesn't know how to hit the delete key.
Not to say that there aren't technophobes in senior management, but in my experience, they're quick learners. Just tell them what to do and they'll remember. Often to your detriment.
The actual problem is the opportunity cost of the loss of legitimate email, both inbound and outbound. Files we send to customers often bounce back because attachments aren't allowed anymore (more of a virus thing than a spam thing, I suppose), requiring time to find alternatives (FTP or mail a CD?). Even emails without attachments are trapped by customer spam lists. Our mailserver has been unfairly blacklisted once or twice (some zealots put you on the list for sending an email circular to paying customers!) and as a result there are several customers we can't email at all. Emails customers send to us sometimes bounce back to them as spam -- this is the worst one, because we never even realise there's a problem unless they call us and complain (in which case it's always ourfault).
The real problem is that email is no longer a reliable means of communication. What is the value of a communication channel that loses many of its messages?
In 45 days time, here are my company's official spam stats.
Total email processed: 271,217
Total junk email identified: 239,560
88.32779% of email sent to our company is identified as spam.
That's over 6000 a day.
That's over 67 per account per day.
Before we installed a spam filter (you may feel free to ask me which), each person had to sift through their hypothetical 10 emails and delete almost 9 spams.
When modding "Informative", please make sure it both has a source and IS actually informative.