Slashdot Mirror
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.
Since I read about a new spam study every other day, I'm wondering if that $22B price tag includes the cost of all the studies being done about the cost of spam?
Funny, I get about 25 spam messages a day... now that's after the corporate firewall/antispam software has had it's hands in it... and really, any message from my boss is counted as SPAM and moved to my junk folder so, yeah, 0 spam from the world, about 25 spams from my boss... yup... near the average then I guess..
---
Programming is like sex... Make one mistake and support it the rest of your life.
Of course they also say people get 18.5 spam per day, and I'm tipping in at 20x that.
Yeah, their estimate is really low. I mean, everyone runs a website that gets millions of hits a day. They apparently don't realize this.
Yes, well, maybe you'd have less if you weren't publicly providing your email on one of the most viewed forums on the internet.
NMG
Here, let me beat you over the head for a while...what, too ignorant or stupid to buy a helmet?
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
A telephone-based survey of adults who use the Internet found that more than three-quarters receive spam daily. The average spam messages per day is 18.5 and the average time spent per day deleting them is 2.8 minutes.
2.8 minutes to delete 18 e-mails? That's 10 seconds per mail, man that's ineffective. I'd guess the companies would save billions if their employes learned how to read and respond faster, or at least if they learned that if the e-mail subject says "c1al|z", it IS spam, no reason to verify it by reading the thing.
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
The real problem that I noticed from the study is that 4% of people have bought something advertised through spam. That's the real problem. If everyone would just ignore it, and get there *cough* all important pills elsewhere (try Mexico!) then none of us would get spam. It's a simple cost to benefit ratio, as long as enough people buy things off spam, spammers will continue to operate.
http://www.pterrys.com
Welllllll depending upon how you look at it, I have four different email accounts (one work, two personal, one throwaway). Three of them get no spam, or one piece of spam every other week. One of them is my "sure I'd like to d/l this trial software here's an email account" account that gets hit with, on average, 50 pieces of mail a day.
It's more about intelligent handling of the addy than just having an inbox.
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.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
That number sounds wrong, how could spam cost anyone billions when all they have to do is hit the delete key!!!
In other news, the replacement keyboard industry has announced increased sales of about $22 billion dollars a year...
I'll turn into a supernova and burn up everything. Well I'll turn into a black little hole and you'll turn into string.
These kind of 'calculation' assume that 100% of the time an employee is 'working' is productive work. Trust me, it is not, especially when the employee has unmonitored access to the net.
Now I don't say that employees SHOULD be productive 100% of the time. I just say that the time spent deleting spam is probably taken on 'unproductive' time anyway, not on things that need to be done.
Eureka Science News - automatically updated
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.
I spent 5 minutes today scratching myself when I got into work. Now if everybody in the world does that, it costs $512823812937123 TRILLION DOLLARS every other minute! Then you'll get angry CEOS who will want to enforce rules to only higher ugly women, or remove them from the work force.
This is just more serious bullshit. If they really want to do a study. See how much money is spent on men looking at women's breasts at work. They will find out that is 123190238127398071273891029837129387 TRILLION DOLLARS EVERY minute.
Do these studies ever take into account that people can't spend every single waking second at work doing work, and that it neccessary to sometimes do something different. Although spam does differ, where it is a nusance, and as such it does waste peoples time constantly. But the way the factor it by putting a value on an employees time is very in accurate.
Treat me like a marketing stat, and I'll treat your movie like a series of ones and zeros
Would I prefer that Spam be stopped dead in it's tracks? Regardless of this, yes, because it also occours to me how much time I've wasted on this problem that I could have used doing other more productive things.
Luck favors the prepared, darling.
i'm sorry, but this is such an awful attitude. spam is being inflicted on millions by a handful of greedy spammers. no one "deserves" to be harmed by it.
This sounds a lot like the wildly fictitious "cost of hackers" reports that we have all seen before.
You don't see me declaring that theifs have cost me $120 because I have locks on my doors, do you?
I know that this is a claim of lost productivity, but people sitting in front of computers aren't 100% productive. Expecting them to be so is absurd, and pinning their less-than-perfect output on spam is just scapegoating. We all hate spam, but this is just the usual cost-hunting nonsense....
You're right! We should commission a study to study the effects of Studies on other Studies while they are being studied. It could be the next re-insurance insurance bonanza.
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
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.
Surely the profits on spam, selling the hardware, selling the services, etc. are large, otherwise no one would do it. SO, some people are making money on it, others are losing money on it. Does it equal out?
Vote Quimby!
If SPAM costs $22B to companies, can't they invest another $22B to push the govt into making a DECENT law vs SPAM?
Okay. You tell that to the spammers. Ask them to politely stop, because no one deserves it. See them laugh at you.
Spam is a fact of life, now. There's nothing you can do about it, except take a defensive position.
The article spoke of the impact on end users. The simple solution to this problem is to prevent it from reaching the end users. There are simple and highly effective means to do this. I've personally seen many companies that are unwilling to investigate these means, and just let the problem proliferate.
So in my opinion, yes, they desrve what they get for being lazy in the tech department.
Seems we see these stories about every day or two - 'companies lose $xx billion to such-and-such every year.'
Has anyone added all of these up? With the wild loss estimates from sick days, viruses, spam, major sporting events, bee stings, and Slashdot, I wouldn't be surprised if the world as a whole is running trillions of dollars in the negative...
Well what did you think would happen would you signed up for free sample address labels on freebiecrap.com?
While we in the internet community *hate* SPAM you do bring up a good point. Certainly SPAM sells products and services otherwise we wouldn't be inundated with it.
I wonder what kind of revenue SPAM adds to the economy as a whole.
Anyone have any insight to this?
Instead of raising your voice, try strengthening your argument.
There is a certain part of the population who will buy into anything. Generally they are those who would have been eaten by wolves long ago if it weren't for civilization trumping evolution. In this (relatively) enlightened age, we still have people making a mint as fortune tellers, televangelists, runners of Ponzi schemes, 'multi-level marketing', charity scams, and so on. In fact, I think that many people's tastes run to the untruth told in sonorous, comforting tones.
The Independent: Reverend Spooner Arrested in Friar Tuck Incident - ISIHAC, Historical Headlines
Someone should do a study about how much Slashdot cost companies in productivity each year.
I am running Spamassassin 3.0 (using qmail-scanner) with Razor, Pyzor, clamav and F-prot. 90% of the email coming into my server (with 10 or so users) is spam, but with the Razor rules and the URI blacklists turned way up one a day or so gets through, and no false positives yet that I have found. (I won't even talk about the 30+ viri a day.) Qmail-scanner can be set to reject mail at the SMTP level too, which doesn't save much bandwidth but does prevent extra work from bounces bouncing etc.
12:50 - press return.
I think that's unfair. Someone with a website selling honey that they make in their backyard isn't necessarily going to be an expert with spam protection software, but that doesn't mean that they deserve to be punished with a bunch of spam in their inbox.
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. --Will
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.
I suspect that, while the figures these studies come up with are dramatic, they don't actually reflect very much actual loss of "productivity." If time is money, and each minute equals a certain amount, then millions of employees taking several seconds to delete each spam over the course of a year is going to add up. But time isn't money; time is time. American companies need to chill out a bit.
How do they actually figure those $s? I mean, I don't doubt that spam is a problem and it does costs us, but do they really know how long it takes each of us to delete, ignore, *woops!-open* or similarly waste our time on it? I've never actually seen a study that does figure these things properly. With the virus industry for instance, I am very suspicious that the "computer viruses cost us $X" lines are way over estimated on purpose just to get more business for the anti-virus firms. But for that to be the case with spam, there has to be companies that can profit from such studies. Who would that be? Besian (sp?) filter firms? Mozilla? Were they even supporters of the study to begin with?
Just seems like a waste of time at this point. Everyone already knows this stuff is hurting us anyway.
My personal solution (and this is not a paid promotion) was to use Firefox. Instead of spending nearly an hour every day deleting spam, I now spend about 5 minutes. That's my solution. And seeing as the government won't do anything about this anytime soon, I think it's one that most people will end up using.
I know it isn't because it was sent by my Mom! I don't know where she gets the time to research so many products, but damn do I ever appreciate it!
--- What?
Perhaps most striking is that this figure is 0.2% of GDP. Assuming that this money is lost production, then we could boost GDP by 0.2% a year by solving the spam problem. This is a big boost! Of course its really not that simple, but you get my point.
My spam inflow is increasing each and every month:
Jul 2004: between 22000 and 23000
Nov 2004: between 38000 and 39000
Dec 2004: 45663
Jan 2005: 59097
Feb 2005: ~3500 so far
I may be a lowly AC here, but these are real numbers. (I'm not in front of my email right now and I don't remember the numbers for other months.)
Needless to say, it gets annoying to delete ~2000 unsolicited commercial emails each and every day. My legitimate emails number less than 50 per day.
I started agressively firewalling off spammy isps sometime ago, and its really paid off for me. I get maybe 1 spam a week (i check 10 different accounts). 5 different rbl's catch whatever spam my firewall doesnt get.
By carefully white listing people dumb enough to host on a spammy isp whose email i still want, i dont have a problem with collateral damage either.
http://mail.btfh.net/spam.txt
http://mail.btfh.net/asia-spam.txt
Lawyers, MBA's, RIAA? A jedi fears not these things!
2.8 minutes x 200 days x 100,000,000 workers with email = 56 billion minutes ~= 1 billion work hours. The median hourly wage is $18.
Fortunately for us all, dilligent corporations are applying an old remedy to bring these costs down.
Together, we will drive the rats from the tundra.
Since I read about a new spam study every other day, I'm wondering if that $22B price tag includes the cost of all the studies being done about the cost of spam?
/.?
All of these "annual amount of money lost due to X" studies are bullshit.
This is saying that $22B a year is "lost" due to people spending an average of 2.8 minutes a day deleting emails.
Well, how much paper has email saved over the years? How much time has email saved? How much does taking a dump cost businesses annually? What about reading
I've been hearing these "take a miniscule amount of thing X and multiply it by the number of people Y and report REALLY BIG NUMBER Z" studies all my life.
Who cares?
Lets do a more interesting and relevant study for people for a change. How many hundreds of millions of dollars would be saved if we switched to a 4 day workweek? How about the quality of life for everyone having at least 3 day weekends every week? That sounds interesting.
These are some of the ways spam has wasted me money. Perhaps it's just because I'm stupid, how would I know?:
It's just an arms race between the spammers and the spam-filterers, and the filter that works now will probably stop working eventually. I don't see anyone deploying any technological solutions that aren't just a bandaids.
--Bruce Fields
> 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.
As some employees claim to read the mails in question, some have even purchased the products advertized, it appears that the bulk of this cost isn't that the mails are sent but that the employees are willfully seeking distractions in the first place. I would call this the usual cost-hunting nonsense, because people sitting in front of modern computers are not machines.
These are web-connected, multi-tasking, bright-colors-and-lights computers, and expecting employees to stay constantly focused on the task at hand is folly, at best.
I mean, look at me. I'm checking out slashdot while waiting for my build to finish when I could be answering work emails or reading code that I'm about to change. It is a personal decision that one could construe to have cost the company money, but it's really more a part of conducting business with human employees.
If you had read the article in question, you would have found that, of those surveyed, the average time supposedly spent deleting the 18.5 spam messages received per day was 2.8 minutes, rather than 12. I spend more than 2.8 minutes per day going to the restroom.
Do we see reports on CNN saying that allowing employees to use the facilities costs businesses $44 Billion/year? Should we all be in diapers to increase productivity? Would it increase productivity to be in diapers? I know that this is an inevitable result of employing non-slave labor, but the point here is that attempting to quantify these costs in an attempt to demonize spam is an exercise in futility.
Average spam per day .. 18.5
.. 10 seconds
.. Priceless
Time to read each one
Having a bigger penis
You know, I refuse to worry about it. It's bullshit that I should have to obscure my address to avoid getting messages that try to circumvent filters. It's one thing to get an ad in your email. With Bayesian filters and other types of filtering, I can get rid of most of the spam that comes through. It's the ones that have a paragraph from a book, or the bible, or just random words to confuse the filters at the bottom of the message that pisses me off. "Buy C1al1s! Love, Grandma"
The email address I have on here is already up to about 600 spam messages a day, so it's well tainted. I have a couple of them I do not make public, however. My address is 9 years old. I dont' think there's a 9-year old email address out there that isn't hammered with spam.
Instant Karma's gonna get you...
A) No spam at work.
I guess the intranet monkeys who work for Deloitte & Touche are doing SOMEthing right.
B) No spam at home.
After getting fed up, I redirected my spam-infested email address to an autoreply which posed a simple riddle to determine my new email address, that humans who knew me could figure out but not machines. My new email address is owned by my domain, and THAT in turn gets redirected to my GMail account. When I picked the account, I made sure it wasn't easily guessable, and longer than a few characters... and when I need to enter in an email address on ANY site online, I use a mailinator.com disposable email address if at ALL possible. Hey, no spam at all! Zilch! How about that? Why is this so hard in this day and age???
Maybe I should start an antispam consulting practice. Clean all this shit up real fast...