Monday morning you open your inbox expecting to see a few highly important emails regarding the various projects you are working on, when suddenly you are surprised by 25 new emails. Scanning down the list of emails, you let out a sigh of frustration when you realize only 4 are authentic and aimed directly at you. The other 21 are spam!

Spam is unsolicited email that is sent to a countless number of recipients who never granted permission to have the messages sent to them. Spam is generally e-mail advertising for some product. This form of junk email has certain ramifications for people in the business world.

Some businesses receive almost 20,000 messages daily creating more than a simple annoyance for them, but a great and costly problem. For some, spam has become a billion dollar epidemic, costing businesses money in various ways.

One of the greatest costly effects of spam on organizations is the loss of productivity they encounter when dealing with spam. Employees are forced to take time away from their work and manage the spam in their inboxes. Not only does managing it waste valuable time, but spam also creates a distraction and reduces productivity by drawing employees into spam-linked websites.

Another costly impact of spam is the creation of hidden viruses that can get into a system and infect it thus impacting your entire network. If an employee opens an unidentified e-mail that contains a virus, your entire network and customer information is at risk. In addition to viruses, spyware, and adware are problems created by spam that disrupt the flow of you business.

Spam often leaks inappropriate content into corporate email accounts. Much of the material in junk email is offensive, adult material which leads to disputes, costly ramifications as well as legal issues. Surely this is a problem human resource departments would like to avoid.

Another direct effect of spam is the consumption of computer and network resources. Spam eats up a lot of network bandwidth which reduces the amount of data that can be transmitted in a fixed amount of time. Organizations may experience storage loss through backing up emails that are spam.

Clearly the downsides of spam are numerous and can negatively impact businesses of every size. It is important to understand what spam is, in order to combat it in every way possible, particularly with anti-spam software and hardware solutions.