Over 80% of all email traffic is spam. Some of the topics are offensive, explicit and if not addressed becomes a legal matter of allowing a hostile work environment.
Directly though, spam email impacts work productivity and leave email servers at risk.
- Work Productivity: An employee can spend 30 minutes per week deleting their spam emails. They will have a much longer productivity loss if their computer is infected with a virus that came in an email. So using a conservative 0.5 hours per week times 50 weeks per year times $17 per hour, a minimal estimate of wasted labor is $425 per year per employee. This figure is low as significantly more is lost by time taken away from revenue generating activities or the cost impact of missing important emails lost in the volume of junk mail.
- Server Risk: By design, the email server should reply back to the sender if the email address is not valid. Otherwise, the valid sender would not know the email didn't go through. This is what creates the risk situation. What if a spammer sends a large volume of email to bogus email addresses targeted at your server? The server must reply to each and thus will not have time to do anything else. There is more at risk, but this gives one key example.
Most filtering software or hardware that you can implement yourself is often inadequate under today's circumstances. Spam senders continually find ways to get around blacklists and basic content filtering.
Postini Enterprise provides a business grade solution and it externally filters email before they get to your server. This design avoids the server risks associated with internal software email filtering solutions. Other features are email spooling and notifications when your email server ever goes down. Please email us if you are interested.
