Naive bosses ignorant of spam's double threat

Companies are exposing themselves to the threat of legal action, and the more day-to-day problem of lowered productivity, by ignoring official policies on spam email.

More than 40 per cent of companies do not have a policy in place relating to spam in the workplace, according to research conducted by silicon.com.

The problems of this are two-fold. Most obviously there is the impact upon the productivity and efficiency of staff and network resources. By not having a policy in place companies are doing little to discourage staff from clicking on spam, and even replying - thus exacerbating the problem by verifying the email address as being 'live'.

And this certainly appears to be the case. Figures released by SurfControl reveal that employees are indeed wasting time during their working day reading spam. Incredibly, SurfControl claims that 30 per cent of workers spend two minutes on average reading each spam email they receive.

While there may not be enough hours in the day for that to be the case in some offices, it certainly suggests that spam is seriously denting productivity. It is also a serious drain on network resources. Surfcontrol revealed that 50 per cent of companies believe spam accounts for at least 10 per cent of their bandwidth.

However, perhaps of more serious concern is the threat of legal action, which many companies appear not to have woken up to.

Martino Corbelli, marketing director for filtering software firm SurfControl, said: "Some spam emails have completely inappropriate content which can create serious problems for the employer on a legal basis.

"There may be somebody who feels they should be protected from pornographic content, for example, and in some cases they may be prepared to sue their employer if they feel they are being exposed to offensive material on the company's network."

For this reason companies need to ensure they have a policy in place explaining the dangers of spam to staff, outlining the best way of managing mail on the desktop and ensuring all staff are aware of their responsibilities in not furthering the problem by replying or forwarding spam.