This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
The Cost of Spam
The processing of spam has become a major issue for most companies and consumers. The time it takes to process spam is not only a distraction, it is also a source of lost productivity that is affecting bottom lines. According to a recent survey, the effort being applied to managing spam will cost companies $8.9 billion yearly, with $650 million being spent on antispam and content-filtering products alone in 2003.8 Even if you are simply reading the subject line and the sender's name of an e-mail, it takes time to determine whether an e-mail is a legitimate message to you. Often a cursory scan of the subject line is not enough, and you are forced to open some e-mails to determine their validity. This converts to lost man hours processing unsolicited and unwanted e-mail. There is also a cost associated with processing each e-mail where it enters a company or an Internet service provider (ISP). For example, if it takes four servers to process one million e-mails per hour and half of the e-mail being received is spam, then half of your equipment costs are basically going to process e-mails that rarely benefit anyone. You also have to consider the electrical power, maintenance, administration, and storage costs for the extra equipment you have to purchase just to keep up with the additional e-mail traffic that you have to process.
Consider some numbers: Nortel Networks indicates that 70 percent to 80 percent of the e-mail that they receive each day is spam, and the rate of spam doubles every 4 to 6 weeks. This costs them about $1,000 to $5,000 per day. Aristotle Inc., a small ISP in Little Rock, Arkansas, indicated that spam costs the company $5 per customer per year. The annual cost to pay for new technology and manpower to manage the spam problem comes to $112,000 a year just for that ISP.9
A report by London-based security firm mi2G shows that spam caused more economic damage than hackers and viruses in October 2003. The report goes on to say that spam caused $10.4 billion in economic losses worldwide, whereas viruses and worms caused $8.4 billion in losses, and hackers $1 billion in losses. Not only have spammers been filling the inboxes of corporations, they have also started attacking operators of spam block lists, which are providers that assist companies with detecting unsolicited e-mail. Spammers are flooding servers of the block list operators with spam attacks, forcing them to shut down. This is leading to increased costs to acquire more bandwidth and protection, costs that will probably have to be passed along to customers.10