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The High Cost of Spam on Business

Spam or UBE (unsolicited Bulk Email) has many costly effects on a business. UBE lowers productivity, because email must now be sorted by a human, causing time to be wasted on a non-productive task.

What is spam?

A "spam" e-mail is generally defined as an unsolicited mailing, usually to many people. A message written for, and mailed to, one individual that is known to the sender is not spam, and a reply to an e-mail is not spam, unless the "reply" repeats endlessly.

Spam e-mailers have become a separate part of the Internet, with their own host computers, methods, and politics. Many Internet sites have begun to forbid spamming, for several reasons – one is a sense that it is unethical, another is that, over time, other Internet sites will stop all e-mail from that site and thus prevent legitimate e-mail from getting through. As a result, spammers have begun to set up their own Internet sites -- sites that cater to, or encourage, spamming.

Impact on Business

Spam also drains network resources and uses up bandwidth. Every message that is delivered to a network takes up bandwidth, with spam accounting for as much as 50% of some networks. Companies are wasting money on unproductive bandwidth every day.

To reduce or eliminate spam, a business can protect itself with an anti-spam filtering solution. A spam filter can use a variety of techniques to catch spam before it is delivered to the clients email account. This keeps the spammers on their "toes", so to speak.

Spam statistics

Spam's Effect on Business Source
IDC estimates that spam represented 32% of all email sent on an average day in North America in 2003 IDC
Anti-spam solutions have helped organizations save millions of dollars in lost email user and IT staff productivity IDC
62% say their employers use filters to block spam from their work email accounts; half of them get no spam at all in those accounts. PEW
Calculated on a worldwide basis, the IT cost of dealing with spam will rise from $20.5 billion in 2003, to a staggering $198 billion by2007. Radicati

The PowerElf II server appliance ships with a full-featured spam filter. Visit our antispam page for more information about the PE2 antispam appliance.

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