The cost of spam is escalating for enterprises as the amount of unsolicited e-mail being sent continues to reach new heights. If you suffer from a spam filled in-box, you probably agree that the time you waste sorting through it is a huge price in itself. Spam has grown from being merely a nuisance to a significant factor effecting workplace productivity.

If it only takes you five seconds to delete one message you may not think it’s a major issue; however time is money. If you do the math, for someone who receives 100 per day, at minimum wage it works out to over $300 per year - simply to delete the unwanted messages!

Consider that companies with hundreds or even thousands of employees connected to the internet are receiving thousands or hundreds of thousands of spam e-mails a day. Much of the money they pay their employees goes to time spent sorting through junk email. This is not a cost effective way to run a business and contributes to unnecessary expenses and a lower overall employee productivity.

Factor in the cost of time that tech support spends working on systems that have been overloaded, and your overall costs increase. In severe cases where spam has contributed to losing sensitive customer information, there are additional expenses that go into recovering that data. Or worse, in the case where data cannot be recovered, there are even more expenses for redoing work in order to replace lost data as well as potential lawsuits! Clearly the impact spam can have on your business is quite significant.

A basic breakdown of the general costs resulting from spam may look like this:

• Lost productivity
• IT staff costs to manage and maintain anti-spam products
• Unsatisfied end users
• Time wasted sorting and deleting spam
• Loss of data and retrieval costs for IT Tech support
• Replacement of already existing data which was lost due to spam related problems.
• Anti-spam software/hardware costs as well as installation fees
• Waste of bandwidth
• Storage/back-up waste

Certain measures should be taken to reduce the amount of money lost each year to spam related problems. Some of these precautions should include:

• Backing up data and systems to avoid costly replacements
• Establishing a strategy to determine real exposure to spam
• Determining what is acceptable for your organization in terms of spam
• Implementing an anti-spam solution that suits your needs

When you get spam, you pay! That is the bottom line. Spam, although seemingly harmless, is an increasingly costly problem for businesses and organizations who are trying desperately to manage their countless number of costs. With the problems surrounding spam, organizations are suffering from an increase in a variety of expenses.