Anti-spam companies around the world generally agree that the average volume of spam travelling through the internet is as much as 90% of total global email traffic.

That is an alarming, but not surprising statistic.  Spammers have relatively low business expenses.  They only need to harvest an email address database, buy a swarm of virus infected computers to send the emails through, and they are able to pump out millions of spam emails in minutes.

Effective spam prevention costs money.  Just like insuring your property against theft, it would be nice not to have to pay to protect oneself from the evil-doers of the world, but free solutions are simply not as effective as dedicated commercial email security products.  Some businesses would prefer not to pay though, and will give some consideration to not installing an anti-spam system.

What does it cost to NOT prevent spam?

When planning an Exchange server deployment there are formulas used to size the servers and storage that will host the email system.  One of the elements of the formula is the type of mailbox user.  An “average” mailbox user is considered one who sends 10 email messages and receives 40 email messages each day.

Without spam protection that user would receive more like 400 email messages each day, based on the statistic that 90% of global email traffic is spam.  Most end users I speak with already think they receive too much email, so 400 would be an enormous amount to deal with.

Your average end user can recognise most spam email for what it is and delete it accordingly, but that still takes time.  Some spam emails are easier to spot than others, so a generous estimate would be about 5 seconds to assess and delete each spam email.  5 seconds for 360 spam emails is about half an hour of that person’s work time spent dealing with spam each day.  Imagine if you sat down at your computer each morning to sort out your 40 legitimate emails from the 360 spam emails.

For a customer of mine that is a business of about 50 staff the average hourly wage is about $25/hr.  Each day that the business operates without spam protection is $12.50 per employee (1/2 hours x $25), or $625 that it costs the business in lost productivity every day ($12.50 x 50 staff).  The business is open for approximately 230 days each year, which means that spam has just cost them nearly $144,000 for the year just for the time it takes their staff to identify and delete it.

Spam costs your business in lost productivity

The simple calculation above demonstrates one way in which spam can cost your business.  You are paying wages to staff for time spent sorting through spam emails, time that could otherwise be spent servicing your customers and generating revenues.

Before you consider running your email server with no anti-spam protection, or consider running a less effective free solution, take a moment to calculate what it costs your business every day to deal with spam.  You may be surprised just how cost effective an anti-spam solution can be.