Spam Costs U.S. Companies $22B Annually 326
KoReE writes "According to this CNN article, a study at the University of Maryland says the loss of productivity from spam is costing U.S. companies $22 billion per year."
Of course, they also say people get 18.5 spam per day, and I'm tipping in at 20x that.
Does that include the cost of studies about spam? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Does that include the cost of studies about spa (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Does that include the cost of studies about spa (Score:3, Funny)
I get 18 billion (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Does that include the cost of studies about spa (Score:5, Interesting)
All of these "annual amount of money lost due to X" studies are bullshit.
This is saying that $22B a year is "lost" due to people spending an average of 2.8 minutes a day deleting emails.
Well, how much paper has email saved over the years? How much time has email saved? How much does taking a dump cost businesses annually? What about reading
I've been hearing these "take a miniscule amount of thing X and multiply it by the number of people Y and report REALLY BIG NUMBER Z" studies all my life.
Who cares?
Lets do a more interesting and relevant study for people for a change. How many hundreds of millions of dollars would be saved if we switched to a 4 day workweek? How about the quality of life for everyone having at least 3 day weekends every week? That sounds interesting.
Greylisting is the answer! What was the question? (Score:2)
OpenBSD's spamd [openbsd.org] can be configured to protect any sort of RFC822 MTA running on any platform, and it will put an end to spam. I hear that Postgrey does pretty well too.
If you are willing to live with a 5 minute delay in email from a previously unknown sender, then why torture yourselves any further?
Or ... (Score:2)
Or you could start your own business. Of course, you'd go out of business rather quickly, since your competitors would have an extra day up on you every week.
What's spam? (Score:5, Funny)
Uh huh... (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, their estimate is really low. I mean, everyone runs a website that gets millions of hits a day. They apparently don't realize this.
Re:Uh huh... (Score:4, Informative)
I get (spread between my various email accounts) a bare minimum of 100 spam emails a day. Usually that number is closer to 200-300, and occasionally as high as 1000.
My spam filtering takes care of a great deal of this spam (only maybe 5 make it to my inbox) but still.
Re:Uh huh... (Score:2)
I get 2 to 3 spam emails a week.
Sure, this is after the company spam filters. But isn't that like expected nowadays? It's hardly rocket surgery people.
And at my home we get practically no spam. The spamfilter I have just does it's job. If you are tech savvy enough to post on slashdot, I think you are capable of solving your spam problem.
Re:Uh huh... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Uh huh... (Score:2)
-
I'm a nobody. An absolute nobody.
Your sig contradicts you.18 fans, 7 freaks. 25 people with too much free time
Re:Uh huh... (Score:3, Insightful)
Number sounds wrong (Score:2)
I'm being sarcastic. Spam is a huge cost to resources, of course (probably not even counting hijacked resources, an intangible figure). Too bad the government basically told companies they CAN-SPAM as much as they want. Marketing drives America.
Re:Number sounds wrong (Score:5, Funny)
In other news, the replacement keyboard industry has announced increased sales of about $22 billion dollars a year...
Re:Number sounds wrong (Score:3, Informative)
However, to follow your theme, I also spend a similar amount of time throwing away the endless snail-mail I also receive and that has the added downside of killing trees.
I wonder (Score:3, Insightful)
How to get less spam (Score:5, Funny)
Yes, well, maybe you'd have less if you weren't publicly providing your email on one of the most viewed forums on the internet.
Re:How to get less spam (Score:4, Interesting)
I took a few steps to curb spam in 2002: first, change my email address. That alone put an abrupt halt to the flow. Second, added comments forms to all my web sites, to stop the future flow.
Granted, I still get some spam, assumedly because some messages that I send get forwarded and harvested somewhere. I get about 2 or 3 spam emails per week right now, without using any filters at all. So that's acceptable to me.
I continue to advise people to change their darn email address and start anew. It's pretty easy to do for *most* people. I just don't understand the paralyzing fear that overcomes them when I suggest that. I also think that "but my business email address has to stay the same!" is not a valid argument. I have assisted some people here at the university that I work in getting a brand new email address, and (surprise) life went on and people still managed to send them email.
On a side note, I switched to a different bank in 2002, one with no monthly fees. I was amazed at how easy it was to do, and now I must be their most vocal evangelist. I'm constantly reassuring people that they, too, can stop paying monthly services charges to their bank. I think I have six converts so far
And no, 2002 wasn't some magical year of transformation. I think it's just coincidental...
Todd
Re:How to get less spam (Score:4, Insightful)
A funny, but misleading, comment. Slashdot's popularity has little to do with how much spam Taco gets. He could have posted the same contact info at PeterLorreFansUnite.com and the spam spiders still would have found him. He'd be getting roughly the same amount of spam even if his address was posted on one of the most obscure sites on the net.
I publish Vegan.com and until I abandoned the domain for use of email last autumn I was getting something like 2000 spams a day. And as much as I'd like to think otherwise, I suspect Slashdot gets a tiny bit more traffic than Vegan.com ;)
Re:How to get less spam (Score:2)
Spam + Man = He feels like such a SMAN.
10 seconds per e-mail??? (Score:4, Insightful)
2.8 minutes to delete 18 e-mails? That's 10 seconds per mail, man that's ineffective. I'd guess the companies would save billions if their employes learned how to read and respond faster, or at least if they learned that if the e-mail subject says "c1al|z", it IS spam, no reason to verify it by reading the thing.
Re:10 seconds per e-mail??? (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah, that helps speed-filter about 25% of the spammage I see. But what about "UPS Tracking Number" when you've just completed a bit of web-based purchasing and are actually expecting a tracking number in the e-mail? How about obscure and nearly incomprehensible subjects? I can't just crapcan those, because I subscribe to various NetBSD support lists. (If you follow *BSD mail lists, you know what I mean.)
So yes, for the majority of spam, you have to at least preview the content. If you have a slow mailserver, particularly if you use a "download on demand" (IMAP) rather than "download in advance" protocol (POP), you have to pay the content download time. And if you're foolish enough to let your MUA download remote links, that's more time before you figure out the message you're looking at is spam. (If you don't do the remote links thing, all you know is that you've got a blank e-mail. I guess that's spam. Even if it theoretically might have been something you wanted.) So 10 seconds per mail is perfectly reasonable.
Re:10 seconds per e-mail??? (Score:3, Insightful)
but if you were using more complicated email programs, highlighting spam, clicking delete, throughout the day, 10 seconds per spam deleted (which is* not* the same thing 10 seconds per deleting a spam) doesn't sound that unreasonable.
Re:10 seconds per e-mail??? (Score:5, Informative)
Some people don't use local clients which download headers, summarize subject lines, allow you to delete before reading, etc. Boggles the mind, but it's true.
its those distracting pictures (Score:2)
way lowball (Score:4, Informative)
Strange Rationale for Coming Up With $22B... (Score:5, Informative)
>businesses nearly $22 billion a year, according
>to a new study from the University of
>Maryland... The average spam messages per day
>is 18.5 and the average time spent per day
>deleting them is 2.8 minutes.
Using this same logic, I would guess that Solitaire, Minesweeper, etc. cost American businesses at least $200 billion per year. I hate spam as much as the next guy, but using the time it takes to delete spam as the basis for determing its economic impact is ridiculous. A much more accurate number would be the amount of time/money companies use to prevent spam from coming in and going out of their systems, the amount lost to phishing and other scams, etc.
Re:Strange Rationale for Coming Up With $22B... (Score:2)
> Solitaire, Minesweeper, etc. cost American
> businesses at least $200 billion per year. I hate
> spam as much as the next guy, but using the time
> it takes to delete spam as the basis for determing
> its economic impact is ridiculous.
No, you are wrong. It's very important for any business to ask the question "what are our employees doing every day?". If you discover that your employees spend 1 hour a day waiting for the slow laser printer, or so
Re:Strange Rationale for Coming Up With $22B... (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually I think I'm right. Employees aren't 100% productive. That's life. I would bet that 2.8 minutes is statistically negligible in terms of total time a person spends not 100% focused on their job each day. And even in your laser printer example, if I spend an hour not working because the laser printer is down, as long as I still complete the same amount of work that I would have completed had the printer been up, that laser printer outage did not cost the company any of my pr
Re:Strange Rationale for Coming Up With $22B... (Score:5, Insightful)
Wrong.
Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.
You say spam only takes 5 seconds to realise and delete. The spammer is only taking five seconds of your time. What's the big deal? He shouldn't have to pay for doing this to tens of thousands of people because it only wastes a few seconds of their time, right?
Wrong.
Lets take TV ads. A nice short five second TV ad. It only takes up five seconds of everyones time. Maybe millions of people are looking at it, but what's the big deal eh? So how come then advertisers pay millions of dollars every year in order that these five second ads be shown to viewers? Same goes for ads on billboards, radio magazines, blimps, football stadia, buses, T-shirts, people's foreheads and on web banners. They should all be free right?
But spam is even worse than all these other forms of advertising because you cannot ignore spam. You must take the time to recognise it and delete it. If someone sends you spam you cannot look away. With all other forms of advertising, bar junk mail, it costs you the same amount of effort and time to look at the ad as it does not to. That's yet another reason why spam is so evil.
Spam is profitable. That's a fundamental fact. You need to make it either illegal or unprofitable or both. But how to do this without killing regular email? See the ant-spam response sheet for more info on that one.
Re:Strange Rationale for Coming Up With $22B... (Score:2)
Now that I switched to gmail, it's even better for me. I used to have to take time to download messages. Now, gmail filters it out and I never am forced to look at them.
Re:Strange Rationale for Coming Up With $22B... (Score:4, Informative)
So when did time stop being equal to money? I can't speak to the actual amount, but I would say that they actually do cost quite a bundle in lost productivity. If someone is paying for your time, then the things you spend that time on - productive or otherwise - are all costs. This would be crystal clear to you if you were an employer rather than an employee.
Re:Strange Rationale for Coming Up With $22B... (Score:2)
Using this same logic, I would guess that Solitaire, Minesweeper, etc. cost American businesses at least $200 billion per year.
Or for a timely analogy, that Super Bowl ads cost Americans $1.5 billion per year.
A much more accurate number would be the amount of time/money companies use to prevent spam from coming in and going out of their systems
That would be the cost of spam prevention, not the cost of spam.
the amount lost to phishing and other scams, etc.
That'd make as much sense as calling that
What scares me... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What scares me... (Score:3, Insightful)
Bingo! If no one made money at it, it would soon go away. In spite of appearances, businesses don't like pouring money down a hole. Once they realize that's what they're diong, they tend to quit.
Re:What scares me... (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm not convinced by that. The fact is, it's so cheap and easy to send mass email, that people can do it just on a whim, or by mistake.
Anyone get that spam about the lost time-traveller looking for exotic equipment to replace his time machine? And what about all those viruses? Many of them I suppose had the purpose of creating zombies that could later be exploited as spam-senders. But many of them seem to have been done for other reasons, or j
Re:What scares me... (Score:4, Interesting)
I live in Mexico. Here (in Mexico city) there are thousands illegal taxis running. People don't care just as long as they get to their destination. Of course, the number of innocents being raped, kidnapped or assaulted in these illegal cabs.
If people stopped using them, our taxi assault problems would be over.
Generalizing, if people don't care about promoting assaults and rapes in illegal cabs, do you think they'll give a sh*t about SPAM?
only 18.5? who are they kidding? (Score:2)
And I *don't* run a million-hit-a-day website.
I *do* run my own domain, and about half of the spam is bounces from third-party forged spam.
About 10% of it, or about 1
Re:only 18.5? who are they kidding? (Score:2)
Please, don't tell me you used your REAL e-mail as the domain registrar. That's the #2 source of SPAM (website mail harvesting is the #1)
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Key part of the problem (Score:5, Insightful)
There is a certain part of the population who will buy into anything. Generally they are those who would have been eaten by wolves long ago if it weren't for civilization trumping evolution. In this (relatively) enlightened age, we still have people making a mint as fortune tellers, televangelists, runners of Ponzi schemes, 'multi-level marketing', charity scams, and so on. In fact, I think that many people's tastes run to the untruth told in sonorous, comforting tones.
Wrong assumptions (Score:5, Insightful)
Now I don't say that employees SHOULD be productive 100% of the time. I just say that the time spent deleting spam is probably taken on 'unproductive' time anyway, not on things that need to be done.
Productivity costs? (Score:2)
Why so much spam? (Score:2, Informative)
No it can't (Score:5, Funny)
I spent 5 minutes today scratching myself when I got into work. Now if everybody in the world does that, it costs $512823812937123 TRILLION DOLLARS every other minute! Then you'll get angry CEOS who will want to enforce rules to only higher ugly women, or remove them from the work force.
This is just more serious bullshit. If they really want to do a study. See how much money is spent on men looking at women's breasts at work. They will find out that is 123190238127398071273891029837129387 TRILLION DOLLARS EVERY minute.
Do these studies ever take into account that people can't spend every single waking second at work doing work, and that it neccessary to sometimes do something different. Although spam does differ, where it is a nusance, and as such it does waste peoples time constantly. But the way the factor it by putting a value on an employees time is very in accurate.
Re:No it can't (Score:3, Funny)
with that many digits, i think "DOLLARS" would have been fine, that extra "TRILLION" doesn't add much to the IMPACT. :P
Re:No it can't (Score:2)
I thought it was necessary to go over the top and then over it again. We could argue it, but then I would have to conduct a study on the amount of money being wasted by people arguing over silly things on slashdot. Then /. would be sued by those angry CEOs for the billions and billions of dollars that are wasted anually.
Spam: creating jobs since 1995! (Score:4, Interesting)
Would I prefer that Spam be stopped dead in it's tracks? Regardless of this, yes, because it also occours to me how much time I've wasted on this problem that I could have used doing other more productive things.
Funny, I don't see these on profit/loss reports... (Score:5, Insightful)
You don't see me declaring that theifs have cost me $120 because I have locks on my doors, do you?
I know that this is a claim of lost productivity, but people sitting in front of computers aren't 100% productive. Expecting them to be so is absurd, and pinning their less-than-perfect output on spam is just scapegoating. We all hate spam, but this is just the usual cost-hunting nonsense....
Re:Funny, I don't see these on profit/loss reports (Score:2)
Lets say an employee takes 12 minutes per day to delete spam and then thats 60 mins per day. If each employee costs $20 per hour then each employee costs $20 per week. If the company employs 2000 people then it's costing $40,000 per week.... and that's just one medium sized company
If you ran a company and you were told that each employee was going to lose 12 minutes a day whilst on your payroll you wouldn't call this just the usual cost-hunting nonsense
Re:Funny, I don't see these on profit/loss reports (Score:4, Insightful)
These are web-connected, multi-tasking, bright-colors-and-lights computers, and expecting employees to stay constantly focused on the task at hand is folly, at best.
I mean, look at me. I'm checking out slashdot while waiting for my build to finish when I could be answering work emails or reading code that I'm about to change. It is a personal decision that one could construe to have cost the company money, but it's really more a part of conducting business with human employees.
If you had read the article in question, you would have found that, of those surveyed, the average time supposedly spent deleting the 18.5 spam messages received per day was 2.8 minutes, rather than 12. I spend more than 2.8 minutes per day going to the restroom.
Do we see reports on CNN saying that allowing employees to use the facilities costs businesses $44 Billion/year? Should we all be in diapers to increase productivity? Would it increase productivity to be in diapers? I know that this is an inevitable result of employing non-slave labor, but the point here is that attempting to quantify these costs in an attempt to demonize spam is an exercise in futility.
Re:Funny, I don't see these on profit/loss reports (Score:2)
But how about the people MAKING money on SPAM? (Score:2, Insightful)
Total loss (Score:5, Funny)
Has anyone added all of these up? With the wild loss estimates from sick days, viruses, spam, major sporting events, bee stings, and Slashdot, I wouldn't be surprised if the world as a whole is running trillions of dollars in the negative...
CAN SPAM rocks! (Score:2)
I am so glad that the government was able to protect the telemarketing firms freedom of speech.
Now we need a US civilians freedom of silence.
Unfortunately none of this will change through legislation. Our government is too heavily in bed with corporations and not enough concern exists for the individuals experiences. As you can see by the title of this article, it's the cost to business, not individuals, that is worth measuring and reporting on.
4% buys from spam (Score:2)
I think that the 4% who buy from spam, according to the article, should be castrated. Then they won't have any need to buy anything else. Unless they start selling strap-ons.
Deleting spam (Score:2)
You can tell if it is spam by reading one line. It shouldn't take that long to delete spam unless you are using Ximian Evolution.
Muahahaha! (Score:2)
My SpamTaco(tm) campaign must be working, then! Muahahahaha!
What about slashdot? (Score:2, Insightful)
All I can say is, thank God for Spamassassin (Score:2, Interesting)
Loss of productivity, in tiny increments (Score:3, Insightful)
I suspect that, while the figures these studies come up with are dramatic, they don't actually reflect very much actual loss of "productivity." If time is money, and each minute equals a certain amount, then millions of employees taking several seconds to delete each spam over the course of a year is going to add up. But time isn't money; time is time. American companies need to chill out a bit.
Where do they get those numbers? - Waste of time. (Score:2, Interesting)
How do they actually figure those $s? I mean, I don't doubt that spam is a problem and it does costs us, but do they really know how long it takes each of us to delete, ignore, *woops!-open* or similarly waste our time on it? I've never actually seen a study that does figure these things properly. With the virus industry for instance, I am very suspicious that the "computer viruses cost us $X" lines are way over estimated on purpose just to get more business for the anti-virus firms. But for that to be
That's not spam (Score:3, Funny)
Grandma's E-mail (Score:2)
I can see that being accurate because of grandma's who only check their e-mail once a month. They also never post there e-mail address on web groups and web pages, and they never go into chat rooms. They have almost no Internet presence therefore they have almost no exposure to Spam harvesters.
The same thing is true of pranksters who sign up with services like Hotmail or 2d.com. They sign up, send a stupid message and
I've got ya beat. (Score:2)
I don't buy it (Score:2)
I mean there are individual industries out there losing money of that magnitude due to other internet activities (music, movies, software) and the response to that heavy loss is new legislation. I don't see a strong response to the spam problem... in fact, I see government respons
Missing something... (Score:2)
Percentage of GDP (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Percentage of GDP (Score:2)
my spam numbers (Score:2, Insightful)
Jul 2004: between 22000 and 23000
Nov 2004: between 38000 and 39000
Dec 2004: 45663
Jan 2005: 59097
Feb 2005: ~3500 so far
I may be a lowly AC here, but these are real numbers. (I'm not in front of my email right now and I don't remember the numbers for other months.)
Needless to say, it gets annoying to delete ~2000 unsolicited commercial emails each and every day. My legitimate emails number less than 50 per day.
all the more reason to firewall spammers (Score:3, Interesting)
By carefully white listing people dumb enough to host on a spammy isp whose email i still want, i dont have a problem with collateral damage either.
http://mail.btfh.net/spam.txt [btfh.net]
http://mail.btfh.net/asia-spam.txt [btfh.net]
Here's somthing to try (Score:2)
The Onion reports on Industry's Solution (Score:4, Funny)
lost worker productivity isn't only spam cost (Score:2)
lost worker productivity among end users is just one important factor in the total cost of spam.
there are a number of other important factors, including:
survey summary here (Score:2)
Priceless (Score:2, Funny)
Time to read each one
Having a bigger penis
You Newbie (Score:2)
My 9 year old domain was getting flooded with over 5000 emails a day. I finally screamed to my ISP and was given a way to stop some of the emails at the server. Now I'm down to about 300 a day, with filtering in my Mozilla mail client taking care of the rest. It's frikkin' ridiculous what the average email user has to put up with. I'm for any and all legislation that shuts these rat bastards down.
Sent v.s. receive? (Score:2)
Now does this mean that they were sent 18.5 spams perday, or on average they received 18.5?
Their is a huge difference between what is sent, and what the person will auctially receive in their inbox, be it from the ISP blocking it for some various reason, spam software false emails used on websites (could a person be sent a spam, but not get the spam because it can not read their email address correctly (someoneATsomeplaceDOTcom)).
I only receive about 2 spams ad
I get no spam. Here's how. (Score:3, Insightful)
I guess the intranet monkeys who work for Deloitte & Touche are doing SOMEthing right.
B) No spam at home.
After getting fed up, I redirected my spam-infested email address to an autoreply which posed a simple riddle to determine my new email address, that humans who knew me could figure out but not machines. My new email address is owned by my domain, and THAT in turn gets redirected to my GMail account. When I picked the account, I made sure it wasn't easily guessable, and longer than a few characters... and when I need to enter in an email address on ANY site online, I use a mailinator.com disposable email address if at ALL possible. Hey, no spam at all! Zilch! How about that? Why is this so hard in this day and age???
Maybe I should start an antispam consulting practice. Clean all this shit up real fast...
Re:My $0.02 (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:My $0.02 (Score:3, Informative)
Hardware, maintenance, and setup costs money, which was probably figured into this amount (having not RTFA, natch). Last I heard, unless you find a volunteer and some discarded/donated hardware, those things aren't free.
Re:My $0.02 (Score:5, Insightful)
i'm sorry, but this is such an awful attitude. spam is being inflicted on millions by a handful of greedy spammers. no one "deserves" to be harmed by it.
Re:My $0.02 (Score:2, Interesting)
Spam is a fact of life, now. There's nothing you can do about it, except take a defensive position.
The article spoke of the impact on end users. The simple solution to this problem is to prevent it from reaching the end users. There are simple and highly effective means to do this. I've personally seen many companies that are unwilling to investigate these means, and just let the proble
Re:My $0.02 (Score:2)
Re:My $0.02 (Score:2)
>It may be dificult, it may be annoying and time consuming, but no one is without options. To simply do nothing at all is irresponsible, and indefensible.
you said it yourself - it may be difficult/annoying/time consuming, etc. that's why i don't think anyone "deserv
Re:My $0.02 (Score:4, Informative)
Spammers do indeed cost money, lots of it, and the particularly criminal ones using zombies are some of the nastiest of all.
Re:My $0.02 (Score:2)
Joking, of course. But I'd feel more empathy if that happened to a politician than I would for a spammer.
Re:My $0.02 (Score:3, Informative)
My sig politely disagrees with you.
Re:My $0.02 (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:My $0.02 (Score:3, Insightful)
These are some of the ways spam has wasted me money. Perhaps it's just because I'm stupid, how would I know?:
Re:Original Press Release has more details (Score:2, Interesting)
It's more about intelligent handling of the addy than just having an inbox.
more anecdotal evidence (Score:2)
on a few occasions a message has been passed on marked spam. I can't comment on how much spam has been headed for me but filtered and not passed on.
Re:Yeah but (Score:3, Insightful)
I wonder what kind of revenue SPAM adds to the economy as a whole.
Anyone have any insight to this?
OBSimpsons quote (Score:2)
Lisa: "That's specious reasoning, by that logic, I could claim that this rock keeps tigers away."
Homer: "Really? How does it work?"
Lisa: "It doesn't! It's just a stupid rock! But you don't see any tigers around, do you?"
Homer: "I would like to buy your rock."
------------
So, how many rocks can I put you down for?
Re:Anyone ever hear of filters? (Score:2)
No, not really. But now I have this irresistable urge to go implement such a filter
Re:The question begged... (Score:2)
Re:A solution? (Score:2)
All they would need to do with this plan would be to go to Mailboxes etc... or any of those other places and get a bunch of mailboxes, or P.O. Boxes at the postoffice, etc... Also most Spammers don't use the mailbox with their account, the return addresses are BS. So it wouldn't matter all that much. Stopping the hosting of spamvertized sites, might be better.
Re:Gmail out of beta? (offtopic) (Score:2)