$4m – the price of spam to your company

Spam could be costing an average company $4.1m a year in lost productivity, according to a report released on Monday.

For a company of 5,000 employees without anti-spam software, millions of pounds could be going down the drain as workers waste time clearing out their inboxes and IT staff lose productivity coping with the spam fallout.

According to figures from analyst house IDC, an average user spends 10 minutes a day dealing with spam - which can be cut to 5 minutes when anti-spam software is in place. IT staff also benefit from anti-spam measures - their spam-based workload is cut from an average of 43 minutes a day to 19 minutes a day.

The IDC report, The True Cost of Spam and Value of Anti-Spam Solutions, says that businesses without anti-spam measures could really benefit from installing some, with the boost in productivity making a contribution to businesses' bottom line.

The savings could be as much as $783,000 for an average user and $13,000 for IT staff, says the report. However, despite the financial and no doubt annoyance-reducing benefits for users and techies alike, figures from mail-filtering firm Clearswift show that 28 per cent of firms still don't have any spam protection in place.

They might want to start considering it - the execs that IDC surveyed for the report took a generally downbeat view of the spam situation. Three-quarters believe that the spam problem will get worse during the next two years.