Spam costing US companies over $70 billion per year

Survey finds junk email costs $713 per head in loss of productivity.

A study into the impact of spam on US businesses has produced some startling figures for the financial impact of reduced worker productivity, with time spent dealing with spam and ploughing through choked inboxes slowing down performance and wasting companies' money.

The survey, carried out by research firm Nucleus Research, investigated the email use of employees at top US companies, and found that despite dramatic improvements in both the levels of spam getting through to inboxes and the resulting loss of productivity since an earlier study in 2004, on average two thirds of emails reaching inboxes are still spam, out of the 90% of all mail at the gateway.

Improved filtering is mostly behind the reduction in productivity loss, reckoned at 3.1% of workers' time and an annual cost of $1,934 in 2004. The latest figures, 1.2% of time and $713 per person per year, are helped by fewer mails reaching inboxes, an average 21 per day compared to 29 in 2004 thanks to 60% of companies deploying gateway spam filters, and also improved human spam filtering skills, with users taking just 16 seconds to spot and deal with a spam, down from 30 seconds in the earlier study.

The massive $71 billion estimate of the cost of spam, extrapolated from the survey results and overall email usage across the US, does not include time spent dealing with false positives, accidental deletions, searching for legitimate mails in quarantines or even the outlay on licensing and maintenance of spam filtering software. The full report is available from the Nucleus Research site, here.

04 April 2007

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