Spam costs continue to escalate

June 8, 2004

Source: eMarketer.com

Nucleus Research thinks that spam and unwanted email will cost large US companies nearly $2,000 per employee in lost productivity in 2004. According to a report just released, spammers are winning the war for the control of corporate e-mail boxes, and US corporations are losing -- big time.

The report, Spam: The Serial ROI Killer, based on a survey of workers at Fortune 500 companies, by Nucleus Research, has found that despite the passage of the CAN-SPAM Act and widespread adoption of technologies designed to block unsolicited commercial messages aimed at workers' e-mail boxes, companies will experience $1,934 in lost productivity per employee this year -- over twice the level of last year.

While a nearly $2,000 per year loss per employee may sound high to some, most corporations estimate only a tenth of that, Nucleus says its estimate of the annual cost of spam is relatively conservative.

That figure does not take into consideration the dollar expense of IT personnel, software, CPU hardware or bandwidth hogged by spam.

It also doesn't account for the less visible costs of spam, such as the negative impact of virus-triggered network outages on customer satisfaction or increased corporate exposure to harassment suits.

Nucleus found that unsolicited e-mail reduced employee productivity by a staggering 1.4%. Worse, spam-filtering solutions were doing little to control this onslaught, reducing spam levels by only 26% on average.

End users receive more than twice as much spam as they did only 10 months ago. Respondents reported an average of 29 e-mails a day against the earlier average of 13 e-mails. Many sources consider even those numbers low.

For the second year of the survey, Nucleus interviewed employees at 82 Fortune 500 companies, along with IT administrators responsible for managing e-mail and other corporate applications. Some of the key findings include:

1) The average employee receives nearly 7,500 spam messages per year, up from 3,500 in 2003

2) Average lost productivity per year per employee is 3.1%, up from 1.4% in 2003

3) Companies using spam filters report that on average they are able to filter only 20% of the incoming spam, down from 26% in 2003

"As spam continues to spiral out of control, so do the associated costs to organizations, and weak legislation has not had a strong impact on reducing the amount of spam clogging inboxes every day," said Rebecca Wettemann, VP of Research of Nucleus Research. "Filtering technologies are doing their best to lessen the impact and do deliver a clear ROI, but the exponential growth of spam limits their effectiveness."

The one bright spot in the findings was that end users at companies that employ enterprisewide spam filtering received 20% less spam, on average, than companies that had no filtering tools deployed.

So why don't more companies take advantage of the ROI opportunities of anti-spam filters? After all, regaining even a portion of the productivity, bandwidth, hardware and other resources hogged by spam can easily justify the costs of the technology in most situations.

But apparently many IT administrators have shied away from configuring spam filters to more aggressive levels, for fear of deleting legitimate e-mail.

It's a clear case of being damned if you do, spammed if you don't.

We strongly suggest you bookmark our web site by clicking here.
escalate your sales to succe$$ - Start Business Blogging today

escalate.ca runs on the Businessblog™ platform. You are free to link to this site as much as you like.