The true costs of Spam
It was a short and successless conversation.
"All employees need one extra week of paid vacation", I said.
"What for?", my boss inquired, obviously baffled. "Travels? Taking a gap year? A work outing?"
I did not feel well with my answer. "Well... in order to delete their spam mail."
Sounds crazy? But it is far from it, even if the situation sounds surreal. The battle against spam is a main factor in a company's budget, even though it does not appear on any balance sheet. The German Agency for Security in Information-technology (BSI) states in a recent report that spam mail has a share of 85%.
If we conservatively estimate that one gets 100 spam-mails per day (with a mere 17 legitimate mails) it means that one gets 36500 spam-mails per year. If each of your employees requires three seconds (and that would be fast!) for sorting-out and deleting spam mail it means that each employee wastes 30 hours per year just on spam mail sorting- the aforementioned "extra week of paid vacation".
30 hours classifying of spam-mail multiplied by the gross-wages of each employee equals the expenses caused by the war on spam. This value only takes into account the lost work hours of each employee caused by sorting and deleting of unwanted mail. It does not take into account the potential loss in motivation (annoyance-factor), the increased usage of energy and/or material, and the potentail follow-up costs due to deletion of wrong mails (e.g. an order).
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