• silicon.com
• Management
• CIO Insights

By silicon.com, 13 June 2003 16:57

COMMENT Research from silicon.com has revealed that 41 per cent of companies do not have an official policy in place for dealing with spam. Or to put it another way - 41 per cent of companies are leaving themselves seriously exposed to the threats of decreased productivity and costly legal procedures. If a member of staff chooses to reply to a spam email, thus confirming the address as live, their actions will lead to a massive increase in the amount of spam being sent. If a thousand staff reply to a thousand spam emails - then 'do the math', as they say in the US. This is a problem with the ability to snowball. But as long as companies are failing to educate staff about effective email management and put in place policies to determine how staff deal with spam they are creating these problems for themselves. The thought that 50 per cent of companies are giving over at least 10 per cent of their precious bandwidth to spam email, just because they failed to properly plan for it, is incredible. But the problem gets even more serious than that. Given that we find ourselves now in a fiercely litigious society, if a company fails to issue policies on spam they could find themselves in court, and out of pocket to the tune of millions. It would only take one member of staff to claim sexual harassment when confronted with a pornographic spam email which has come in from an external address or been forwarded internally, and a successful resultant court case, and a legal precedent would be set that could seriously, irreparably damage any companies who have similarly 'failed' their staff. It sounds far fetched but this isn't the time for an outbreak 'it couldn't happen here' syndrome.