Spam costs businesses US$50 billion

Spam will cost the world US$50 billion in lost productivity and other expenses, a research firm said this week.

US-based Ferris Research said spam's cost was mainly in lost worker time as employees filtered spam, dealt with messages falsely identified as spam and asked corporate help desks for assistance with unwanted email.

"But the costs could be a lot worse," said Richi Jennings, one Ferris analyst who wrote the report. "We haven't seen as much of a spike in costs as in spam volume, because more organisations are putting in better anti-spam technology."

Since 2003, the spam volume hitting US enterprises has jumped five-fold, yet costs have not even doubled. In 2003, Ferris estimated spam costs to US organisations at US$10 billion, with 2005's lost money amounting to US$17 billion.

It was easy for companies to make a business case for anti-spam technology, particularly in developed countries where labour costs were high and spam volumes high, raising the ratio of dollars lost to productivity drain.

"For developed countries, deploying competent spam filtering software makes good business sense," said Jennings. "The business case in emerging economies is less clear-cut."

In countries such as India and China, spam volumes are relatively low so far and labour costs are lower. Spam there costs less than a third of that in the US.

"If all you're considering is the direct measurable cost and nothing else, you could say that part of these people's jobs is to delete spam," said Jennings. "It's simply because labour is so much cheaper."

In the US, spam's annual per-mailbox cost to businesses was US$170. In Germany, the figure was US$241 a year. Germany's labour costs were higher because of fewer work days and high health care and pension costs borne by businesses, Jennings said.

Server-based filtering was considerably cheaper than desktop-based anti-spam software. The former typically cost US$132 a year per user, the latter US$217.

Doing nothing cost even more. Manually filtering drove up the spam price tag to US$718 a year per user.

"There are very few scenarios where we would recommend desktop filtering," said Jennings. "Unless it was a 'belt and braces' approach with multiple layers at, say, the gateway, inside the network, and on the desktop. But I don't see any trend of this."

He said IT management costs were much larger for desktop filtering compared to filtering at the server.

"Any time an IT department has to roll out software to everyone's desktop, you're talking serious money," he said.

Even for small companies or organisations where few workers got most of the spam, a hosted spam filtering service from a third-party service provider would "probably" be more economical and effective, Jennings said.