It seems like every culture in every generation has its great battle… its seemingly insuperable foe. For those of us nerds who actually want to use our computers efficiently, that foe is spam. A slimy yet invisible army, spammers develop news ways every day to cross our lines of defense. And all-too-often, they succeed.
While spam on your home computer will always be a pain, companies have it even worse-- no matter the size of a business, chances are they have to deal with large amounts of spam. It’s estimated that about 100 billion (that’s 1,000,000,000 in case you want to count the zeros) swarm the world’s email servers every day.
In essence, 9 out of every 10 emails is nothing but a waste of time.
Though spam is so widespread that many simply take it as a matter of course (you want to use email, you’ve got to have spam), dealing with spam takes up a surprising amount of time. Want to get an idea of how much time is wasted sifting spam? Think in it in terms of a company. If you get a few dozen (or a few hundred) spam emails mixed in with your important correspondence every morning, so does everybody else in the company. Multiply the time you spend by the number of employees, and you have a good idea of the productivity that’s wasted each day.
What Spam Costs your Company
Particularly during the last two years, companies have experienced an unsettling increase in the amount of spam they receive. Spammers are just getting better and better at getting through the defenses we set against them. Think how much more Napoleon would have gotten done with slippery spammers on his side!
Spammers are constantly using new technology and developing new tactics to get through anti-spam protection. Why? Not because they want to shake things up by annoying a company’s employees with spam. They send out increasingly tricky and more convincing emails to steal personal information or to convince recipients to buy useless, scammy products. Even worse, many spammers trick recipients into clicking links that will turn their computer into a spam-spewing machine. A vicious circle.
While spam bothers everybody involved, for companies the loss is money-- mostly in the form of productivity. Time spent sifting through spam is time not spent working. Even worse is time spent in confusion over an email that was mistakenly deleted by a spam filter. Want to see more money spin down the drain? Spam also eats up bandwidth and increases company spending on storage and networking.
How much companies waste each year on spam isn’t easy to calculate, as some of these costs are inconcrete. However, it’s estimated that U.S. companies alone lose close to $10 billion a year to spam. Want to see the zeros? That’s $10,000,000,000.
Keeping Spam Under Control
While spam is (and always will be) the enemy that keeps on giving, no company should sit back and let spam take over. Even though the lack of regulation of the internet makes taking legal action against spammers difficult, there are more direct steps companies can take to stop spammers. Namely, spam filters and anti-spam software.
There are countless different anti-spam products on the market today. The most common spam filters use algorithms to inspect phrases, words, and the recipient’s email history to determine whether a message is likely to be spam. Other filters check public and custom blacklists, along with whitelists and greylists.
But what one person considers spam may be something another would want, such as a newsletter. Because of this, it’s important to allow “spam-marked” mail to be delivered to the user-- he or she will be able to look in their spam folder for any missing messages. A really great spam filter will pay attention to what users mark as spam and what they do not, learning how to determine what is junk and what is genuine.
This type of “learning” spam filter is called a Bayesian filter, and it uses mathematics to learn how to deal with certain kids of messages. The more this filter is utilized by users, the smarter and more effective the filter becomes. And unlike keyword or phrase filtering anti-spam software, Bayesian spam filters can adapt to any kind of spam-- not just the written word. When used with technology that recognizes spam images and attachments, these filters can put up a great defense against spam.
Reducing your Company’s Volume of Spam
Getting the amount of spam your company receives to a manageable level (and reducing the effect spam has on employees) requires you to take steps on several levels. First, you need to install an anti-spam product that can identify and block as many types of spam as possible without deleting genuine emails. Next is training. You need to train employees how to prevent and deal with spam as it comes in. They should be trained to delete suspicious emails immediately and never click on links or reply to emails from a spammer.
The truth is, spam is here to stay. For every step we take to defend ourselves from it, spammers figure out a new way to slip through our defenses. However, with a quality anti-spam product you can really make a difference in the amount of spam that slips through to bother your employees-- and make them less productive. Combined with a little end user education, any company can build a successful barrier against spam.
Article written by David Kelleher, a Communications and Research Analyst
at GFI Software. Visit GFI at http://www.gfi.com
