Alarming Growth

"Spam accounts for 45% of all e-mails, or 15 billion messages every day, and costs business world-wide a total of $20 billion a year in lost productivity and technology expenses, according to the Radicati Group, a market research firm in Palo Alto, CA. The firm predicts the number of daily spams will rise to more than 50 billion by 2007, and costs will reach almost $200 billion per year."

-- Wall Street Journal, August 2003

There is no doubt that spam is growing at an alarming rate in both personal and corporate inboxes. According to the Radicati Group, spam accounts for 45% of all emails and that number is expected to continue increasing. That's just simply astounding and unacceptable.

How is spam affecting your company? How much is spam costing your company?

Using a conservative approach, let's take a look at how much spam is estimated to cost a company of 1000 people.

If we make the assumption that each person receives on average 20 spam emails per day and spends on average 15 seconds processing each email, then that means the company receives about 7.3 million spam emails over the course of an year and that its employees spend about 30,500 hours processing these spam emails by either deleting them or responding to them. That's 30,500 hours of lost productivity!

To quantify this lost productivity, let's assume that the salary per person averages out to be $60,000. This translates to a productivity loss of over $877,400 in a year.

So, just looking at employee productivity, spam is costing this company of 1000 employees over $877,400 a year. If you further calculate in technology expenses associated with spam, such as the amount of time wasted by the email servers in processing all the spam emails and the amount of time IT support staff spends battling spam, you'll find that the cost of spam only goes up.

The Barracuda Spam Firewall helps you dramatically reduce the amount of spam your company receives and subsequently, reduce your costs associated with spam. Most customers see a return in their investment in just a matter of days.