Careful where you're putting that technology

Today silicon.com reported that poorly configured or defective anti-spam services may actually be costing businesses $3.5bn.

Compared to the $10bn estimate relating to the cost of spam this seems the lesser of two evils, but the numbers don't tell the whole story.

The problem lies with false positives - emails identified and treated as spam, which were actually genuine, or solicited by the recipient. In essence, emails which users want to receive are being thrown out with the spam.

What the $3.5bn relates to is time spent wasted chasing emails which have gone astray and taking measures to reconfigure filters to avoid future instances of the problem. What it doesn't take into consideration are the more unquantifiable, yet potentially far more serious costs.

Email is now the preferred communication tool for businesses, but if it can't be trusted then what might that say about your business? If clients are kept waiting for a reply they are not going to be pleased and may well take their business elsewhere. But what if you never even got to see their original email? What if it was deleted or filtered because it triggered the spam filter.

Instances of emails being filtered because they contained the word 'sex' are not uncommon. But this proved an embarrassment for companies doing business with or from Essex, Sussex or Middlesex to name but a few. People with surnames such as Sexton may also be blacklisted unfairly - and as for Scunthorpe - let's not even go there.

So are false positives actually more costly than receiving spam - in a lot of ways the answer is yes. At least dealing with spam you know the cost is related to time and bandwidth - those you can quantify.

But if you lose a major customer, clients or sales lead because an important email got filtered out, the cost of false positives - which is far less quantifiable - can all of a sudden seem far more of a concern.

In truth, the message is simple. Think before you deploy any kind of technology. Of course you should be filtering spam, but you should be doing it with all the information available on best practice at your fingertips.

Badly or wrongly deploying technology may just be the most costly mistake you ever make and with IT budgets already stretched we need to make sure what little there is gets spent wisely and to the benefit rather than detriment of the company.