Spam Expects to Cause Heavy Losses to Organization This Year

According to San Francisco-based Ferris Research, an IT market research company, spam is a nuisance and also expensive as it results in loss of productivity. A study conducted by the company suggests that there is an expenditure of 4 cents to delete every spam mail.

In fact, according to Ferris, spam will result in the global expenditure of $130 Billion in 2009, with $42 Billion in the United States alone. The estimated figures are a 30% rise over 2007 that themselves represented a 100% rise over 2005.

However, according to the Ferris analysts, the costs have not spiked as much as the volumes of spam since more companies are using advanced anti-spam mechanisms.

Kyle Restoule, one of the founders of Appleton's TechNosis, a company that.manages the IT requirements of SMBs, says that spam is something dangerous to experience, as reported by postcresent on April 7, 2009. Restoule has disclosed that a particular organization, whose name he didn't reveal, receives over 1 Million junk mails every week. He said that all the e-mails regularly attacking the organization were consuming its bandwidth and even preventing it from conducting normal online work.

Meanwhile, security professionals say that spam volumes are significantly growing and the problem of spam is so severe that an individual Internet user could easily receive 40-100 spam mails per day. Moreover, with the strong return of image-based spam, unsolicited e-mails could mean much greater risks.

According to an Israel-based Commtouch, a Web security technology company, during Q4 2008, spam rates accounted for a mean of 72% of the total e-mails and reached a peak level of 94% during October 2008. Nevertheless, the company stated that spam volumes dropped to 59% post the McColo shutdown.

However, a new report from Postini, an e-mail security vendor for Google, indicates that spam volumes are back to the pre-McColo levels. Further, spam volumes in Q1 2009 were the highest over a period of one year and growing at a mean rate of 1.2% per day.

Ultimately, experts suggest users to deploy a good spam filter, adding that filtering at the server is cheaper than anti-spam solutions at the desktop.

Related article: Spam Scam Bags a Scottish Connection

» SPAMfighter News - 4/18/2009