Spam Costs Businesses $712 Per Employee Yearly, According to Nucleus Research
Wednesday, 04 April 2007
Nucleus Research, a global provider of information technology research and advisory services, today announced that the spam epidemic is costing US businesses $712 per employee each year in lost worker productivity.
According to a survey of 849 e-mail users conducted during March 2007, Nucleus Research and KnowledgeStorm found that two out of every three e-mail messages received by today’s business users are spam.
As a result, users are spending 16 seconds identifying and deleting each spam e-mail, which translates into an annual cost of $70 billion to all US businesses.
"Although most organizations have deployed some spam filtering technology, it clearly has not solved the spam problem – in fact, in some cases it’s made it worse,” said Rebecca Wettemann, VP of Research of Nucleus Research. “Spam is no longer just a technology problem – it’s a problem that we should be attacking with more than just technology.”
To download the most comprehensive report on spam to date, “Spam: The Repeat Offender,” go to www.NucleusResearch.com.
Some additional key findings in the report include:
· Looking at the total e-mail traffic, Nucleus estimates that at least 90 percent of e-mail reaching corporate servers is spam.
· The average user receives 21 spam messages to their inbox each day.
· Many e-mail filtering technologies block anything with the word “Nigeria” in the title or text.
“The Companies and their employees are beyond fed-up with the spam problem,” said Jeff Ramminger, executive vice president, KnowledgeStorm. “In fact, almost 20 percent of respondents believe jail time is an appropriate punishment for serial spammers. While that’s probably not a realistic outcome, it indicates that frustration with spam has reached a boiling point.”
The most common types of spam identified by respondents were adult oriented solicitations (86 percent), financial lending solicitations (80 percent), and retail offers (76 percent).