Spam Firewalls

Spam may be cheap for the people who send it, but it can be a serious expense for your business. According to a study conducted earlier this year by Nucleus Research Inc., spam management costs U.S. businesses more than $71 billion annually in lost productivity — $712 per employee. In 2007 it was estimated that 70 percent of all email was spam.

Lost Productivity: Spam wastes employees' time. The average employee spends 16 seconds reviewing and deleting each spam message, according to Nucleus Research. The company estimates that at businesses that quarantine spam (where junk messages are placed in a directory for review and confirmation by recipients), each user spends an average of 4.5 minutes per week reviewing messages. Deleting messages, however, turns out to be the most expensive spam strategy. The average employee at companies that delete spam messages loses an average of 7.3 minutes per week looking for lost legitimate messages.

Wasted Storage: Companies that quarantine spam must add extra storage capacity to accommodate suspicious mail so that users can review it at their leisure. But many users never bother to review their quarantined messages, so the email just sits there, consuming storage space and money.