Anti-spam efforts more costly than spam?

Some companies sick of spam email have actually done more harm than good when implementing anti-spam filters - as genuine business gets thrown out with the natural Viagra and low interest loan junk mail, and employees spend precious time chasing up emails which have gone astray.

US from Ferris Research suggests the cost to businesses of false positives - emails wrongly identified as spam - could be as high as $3.5bn. This takes into account time spent chasing emails which have been mistakenly filtered out or sifting through junk mail folders to find genuine emails.

Time spent in the IT department asking them to recover an email or on the phone asking 'why didn't your reply to my email?' or 'did you get my last email?' soon adds up and Ferris puts the cost at $50 per head per year in the US, saying costs in the UK are likely to be very similar.

Chris Williams, co-author of the report, told silicon.com: "It costs an individual about $50 per year in lost productivity, due to searches they make for lost messages, communication with other parties about the status of email and updates they make to their spam custom-filters and white lists.

"There are other costs as well for administrative assistance and helpdesks, but the loss of user productivity is the major cost.

"Although we did not make an estimate for costs in the UK or worldwide, I believe that similar costs would be faced by UK email users. Essentially this is a universal problem."

On the other hand, Ferris estimates that spam will cost US businesses around $10bn this year - so the costs associated with false positives would appear to still be the lesser of two evils.

Further to that, companies should be able to crack down on false positives as they realise how to best refine their anti-spam strategy but the problems aren't just tied in to those headline figures.

While $3.5bn is obviously considerably less than $10bn, there are other hidden, unquantifiable costs involved with false positives which could push the costs up considerably. This is because lost business is not taken into account. Companies may well find important leads get thrown out with the junk mail and may see a very real detrimental effect of false positives on their bottom line.

Similarly, with email now the preferred form of communication, business relationships can suffer if there is no guarantee that a message is getting through, or that businesses are contactable.

In short, it is important that companies realise they need to combat the problem of spam, but they need to do it carefully in a researched fashion to avoid damaging the very company they are trying to protect.