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Spam Costs U.S. Companies $22B Annually
KoReE writes "According to this CNN article, a study at the University of Maryland says the loss of productivity from spam is costing U.S. companies $22 billion per year."
Of course, they also say people get 18.5 spam per day, and I'm tipping in at 20x that.
This dosn't take into account how much time and effort they put in to filtering out spam, and doing all this crap. I've had to abandon email address and spammers have made an entire domain of mine almost useless for sending email because they started jojobbing (forging headers to look like the mail came from my box, with random addresses so I get tons and tons of bounce messages) it when sending spam.
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
>Time wasted deleting junk e-mail costs American
>businesses nearly $22 billion a year, according
>to a new study from the University of
>Maryland... The average spam messages per day
>is 18.5 and the average time spent per day
>deleting them is 2.8 minutes.
Using this same logic, I would guess that Solitaire, Minesweeper, etc. cost American businesses at least $200 billion per year. I hate spam as much as the next guy, but using the time it takes to delete spam as the basis for determing its economic impact is ridiculous. A much more accurate number would be the amount of time/money companies use to prevent spam from coming in and going out of their systems, the amount lost to phishing and other scams, etc.
JAMWiki Java-based Wiki engine
I believe that any company that is too ignorant to install protections on their systems, or too stupid to find someone to do it for them, deserves to lose their money.
Hardware, maintenance, and setup costs money, which was probably figured into this amount (having not RTFA, natch). Last I heard, unless you find a volunteer and some discarded/donated hardware, those things aren't free.
Someday, you're going to die. Get over it.
I'm a nobody. An absolute nobody.
I get (spread between my various email accounts) a bare minimum of 100 spam emails a day. Usually that number is closer to 200-300, and occasionally as high as 1000.
My spam filtering takes care of a great deal of this spam (only maybe 5 make it to my inbox) but still.
I very very very rarely get spam and when I do it is quite easy to shutoff. Boy that is asking for it. For every person or company I meet I give them a unique email address. This is actually quite easy to do if you own your own domain. This helps with 2 things. 1. If a friend gets a virus that gets my address and uses it to start sending spam, I just delete that address and give them a new one. 2. If I gave a company I do business with an address and I start getting spam I just delete the address. If they say they don't sell my information then I guess I could sue them as well, since the only way someone could have gotten that address is from them. I also never give my email address out in public where I can avoid it. I know this is not possible for some public speaking peeps, but then you use a unique address for public and one for private. Then you just have to do spam filtering on 1 address. For any sites that require an email that I don't trust I just use Mailinator.
However, to follow your theme, I also spend a similar amount of time throwing away the endless snail-mail I also receive and that has the added downside of killing trees.
init 11 - for when you need that edge.
It's an uphill battle. For instance, new zombies are expected to start sending through the mail server, since port blocking and SPF have put such a crimp on them directly sending into the great big wide. Now outfits like the one I work for are faced with enforcing SMTP Auth on our clients (our few old customers running ancient versions of Eudora are screwed here), *but* if a zombie starts sending via MAPI, it's quite possible that they will be authenticating to our mail server. Our world becomes darker, as we now have to start much more heavily policing outgoing mail.
Spammers do indeed cost money, lots of it, and the particularly criminal ones using zombies are some of the nastiest of all.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Some people don't use local clients which download headers, summarize subject lines, allow you to delete before reading, etc. Boggles the mind, but it's true.
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That's not entirely true. High profile email addresses get used all the time by people who need an email address to fill into a web form and don't want to use their own. I used to use an email address that was a common two-word profanity (separated by a '@' with '.com' appended to the end), and I would receive thousands of messages every day thanking me for signing up with their service/promotion/etc. I eventually had to give up the address.
A shame really...it was a great address to give out at bars/clubs/etc because no one would forget it. But having someone angry with you because you never replied to their message since it was burried under a mountain of SPAM was the worst part. Wasn't worth the convenience of having a memorable address.
> Spam is a fact of life, now. There's nothing you can do about it, except take a defensive position.
My sig politely disagrees with you.