U.S. Businesses Lose $712 Per Worker Due to Spam

U.S. businesses are incurring losses of $712 per employee each year due to spam assaults, according to a study report by Nucleus Research. The company released the report on April 2, 2007. That's what spam cost in terms of lost productivity, revealed the survey by IT research companies, Nucleus Research and KnowledgeStorm.

The survey conducted in March this year involved 849 e-mailers. The figures found that two out of three e-mail messages that U.S. business people received were spam even though nearly 60% of businesses filtered spam.

The report, "Spam: The Repeat Offender" said users tend to spend about 16 seconds after each message to determine whether it is spam or not. Some messages are so well crafted that they bluff users into thinking they were from their colleagues. In addition users have to give time to delete those spam mails that add up to a yearly expenditure of $70 billion for the entire U.S. businesses.

However, the time spent for spam mails had remarkably decreased compared to 2004. The respondents of Nucleus Research survey of that year said that they spent 30 seconds to assess and remove spam mail amounting to yearly cost of $1,934 per worker.

The survey found a heightened frustration among e-mail users against spam. 18% of all respondents desired jail for spammers while a third of them wanted sentences beyond 36 months.

Spam is no more merely a technology problem. There is more than technology required to attack the problem, said Rebecca Wettemann VP of Research at Nucleus Research to the press. TMCnet published her statement on April 2, 2007.

Executive VP of KnowledgeStorm, Jeff Ramminger also agreed that frustration due to spam had risen to a boiling point. He said nearly 20% of respondents viewed that prison sentence was an appropriate punishment for seasoned spammers.

The Nucleus survey also discovered that 90% of e-mails coming into corporate servers were spam and a user received an average of 21 spam mails in his inbox on a single day.

The respondents identified the most common spams as adult related solicitations accounting to 86%, financial lending offers -80% and retail proposals -76%.

Related article: U.S. Businesses Lose $712 Per Worker Due to Spam

» SPAMfighter News - 4/11/2007