SPAM : the unintended consequence of ecommerce
One of the problems of doing business online -- spam -- has been spawned by of one of its greatest benefits: email.
Unwanted commercial email (junk mail in some lexicons, spam in most) has grown 115% in the last year, from 15 billion email messages to a projected 35 billion this year, according to a study from the Radicati Group. But Radicati may have been behind the curve. Brightmail, which provides gateway spam protection to 7 of the 10 largest ISPs in the US and handles over 15% of all email in the world, said this month that in February 2004 it filtered 91 billion internet email messages and identified 62% of these as spam on a worldwide basis, up from 42% a year ago. The spam rate has continued to gradually climb and should hit 70% by the end of the year, Brightmail says. In the Asia Pacific region, Brightmail identified 52% of all internet email as spam in February, up from 50% in January. Costing issues The cost to corporates is measured in many ways, but IDC last year came up with a spam 'cost calculator' < www.spamcalculator.com > and ran a real world study that confirmed many worst suspicions in a real-time corporate case study. The most important cost of spam is in lost productivity, IDC confirmed, and the study showed a time cost that averaged 7.92 seconds per spam message -- a time span that did not include actually reading spam, but simply noting and then deleting it message by message. Since 49% of the mail volume at the server level was spam, filters were essential -- but intercepted only 61% of the spam. The filter system used by the under-60 employee company was "heuristic" -- meaning it "learned" what spam was by analysis of what recipients identified as spam -- and the company under study estimated that the filters would pick up 85% of spam within a year of installation. It said that, without filtration and based on the financial information provided by the study company, the productivity cost of spam over a one-year period would be $US31,304 and the "lost opportunity" cost -- the result of work that could have been done while spam was being handled -- was an astonishing $US52,205. The filter system itself cost the company $US9,984 for its first year of use and dropped the productivity cost of spam to $US11,770. That meant, IDC reported, that the total one-year cost of spam would still be $US21,755 -- a substantial improvement but still a substantial cost. But there are other costs, most notably -- especially for enterprise operations -- bandwidth, storage and support. One large US lawfirm reported that, in 2003 with an annual email flow volume of 4.5 million messages, the 54% that was spam cost it $US17,000 a year in bandwidth and resulted in an annual SAN storage of around $US114,000. Support costs were also large at that lawfirm and problems associated with spam email cost it about $84,000 per year. Projected costs of a spam flow at 74% for this year would have jumped the annual cost of spam from $US515,000 to $US630,000. The implementation of a spam filter system saved the firm massive amounts of money, bringing the cost of spam down in 2003 from $US515,000 to $101,700, a saving of $US413,300. The savings for 2004 would have been even greater because the costs after filtering grow far more slowly than the costs of not filtering. NWFusion, which wrote up the spam costs study of US lawfirm Allen Matkins, maintains an online spam cost calculator < www.nwfusion.com/spam/index.jsp > that can provide a rough but instant view of the costs of spam for any business operation. Preventing spam Half a dozen plans are under study, some by government agencies, to prevent spam, but spam operators have proven very agile in counteracting measures designed to cut them off, measures that sometimes even worsen the situation. So-called "black lists" gave rise, for example, to the use of remotely controlled servers to send spam without the knowledge or permission of the server owners. Legislative initiatives are too recent to have had a measurable effect, even in the US where a federal law, the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003, makes it a crime to send spam when it is disguised as anything else and in the UK where spam operations can attract £5,000 fines. That leaves anti-spam technology as the principal solution -- and it is a blossoming market, heading now into a major consolidation phase. Estimates for growth, of course, depend on who is doing the estimating. Ferris Research said, once all the beans had been counted, corporations would have spent $US120 million in 2003 on antispam systems while Radicati said the actual 2003 spend was $US635 million.
Reproduced from an article published by National Business Review - New Zealand
© National Business Review - New Zealand
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