Spam is essentially unsolicited mail and is usually commercial advertising of some description. The products being advertised usually originate from less 'palatable' vendors, often for dubious products, get rich quick schemes or quasi-legal schemes.

The reason for the exponential growth is simply that unlike viruses which are essentially just vandalism, Spamming is a profitable industry that can earn Spammers sizeable incomes. A worldwide leader in email and Web security appliances released its annual spam report in December 2007. The report highlighted that spam email accounted for 90-95% of all email in 2007, up from an estimated 5% in 2001. Although the actual number of commercial responses to these emails is statistically low for this type of advertising, the sheer volumes balanced against the minimal effort to create and send Spam mean that even a very low percentage return is economically worthwhile to the spammers.

 

Whether you are successful in filtering out Spam or not, it must still be processed and so taxes system resources. IT resources and budgets are consumed as software and/or hardware filtering mechanisms need to be purchased, setup, configured, updated and maintained. Also Spam recipients reading, deleting and indeed cursing Spam are doing so on company time and that's costing your business.

The actual costs to a company with 100 employees, with an average salary of €45k, each of whom receives fifteen junk e-mails per day and spends about 10 seconds deleting each one, can expect to lose close to €30,000 per year in wasted salaries and 150 days in lost productivity.

Ergo recommends that all businesses implement an anti spam policy. This should clearly define the need for company employees to preserve the privacy of all email recipients both internally and externally. An anti spam policy should make clear that email must always contain clear and un-obscured headers, should never use invalid domain names, and should clearly identify the sender.

In addition to this Ergo strongly recommend the installation of commercial grade anti-spam filtering software such as Sophos PureMessage or hardware spam filtering devices such as Barracuda Spam firewall, Ironport or SonicWALL Email Security.