The Effect of Spam on Business

posted by Ted on December 9, 2011

Spam, or junk email, is one of the largest frustrations for Internet users. For businesses, this frustration adds up to a significant amount of dollars spent trying to prevent it. Reports estimate that spam costs U.S. businesses more than $132 billion in lost productivity in the last year, which equates to over $1000 per employee. According to FastCompany.com, 89% of the 107 trillion emails sent in 2010 were spam. Of those 89%, most were sent for pharmaceutical promotions – as virtually anyone with an email inbox can attest to.

The thing that makes spam so unique, and subsequently one of the reasons it seems to increase every year, is that the cost of email is placed on the receiver rather than the sender. With traditional direct-mail, a person or company spends money on every piece sent. Think about the amount of junk mail you receive every day at your home and business. Now imagine if each piece of mail did not have a hard-cost for the sender. The US Postal Service would likely be hiring rather than looking for ways to cut expenses. This would also mean that, much like email, regular mail would likely be ignored more often.

Spam can also hurt the reputation of a business as well. It is all too easy to “spoof” or fake the email address that an email shows it is being sent from. A business certainly doesn’t want customers and clients to receive junk or malware emails with their company’s name in the sender’s address bar. Spoofing email is, unfortunately, very easy to do as it exploits a level of trust that the basic email protocols use. When these protocols were initially developed no one envisioned the future of email to be what it is. While there is no full-proof method to prevent email address spoofing, newer methods such as SPF records and the Sender ID framework are working to reduce it. It is important for businesses to put these new safeguards in place, as the sooner the adoption rate increases, the sooner more mail servers will start enforcing them.

Fortunately there are several hardware and software products that can be deployed to protect a business from spam and the security threats they bring. Depending on the given email infrastructure, a dedicated-hardware solution may be the appropriate solution. For others, a third-party Software as a Service (SaaS) solution may be a better fit.

With the number of spam emails being sent increasing every day, every business should ensure that they have necessary solutions in place to protect and prevent it, to improve the production rate of their employees and protect the reputation of their business.

Tags:business,email,email marketing,internet,internet marketing,marketing strategies,small business