[The Tool]

While spam is a nuisance for every e-mail user, it's a lot more than that for IT organizations--it's an expensive headache. It clogs up users' inboxes and hogs network bandwidth. It takes up disk space on your mail server and, depending on your e-mail system, on clients too. Perhaps worst of all, it eats up your employees' time, even if they don't open every unwanted message. Spam is cheap to generate, and even with an extremely low success rate, it nets enough of a return for spammers to continue their annoying ways.

Quantifying the cost of spam is a complex exercise, but organizations like Computer Mail Services and Ferris Research have tried. An employee who gets only five spams a day, if he spends 30 seconds dealing with each e-mail, will waste over 15 hours a year on junk mail. That may not sound like much, but multiply it by each employee's hourly rate and by your total number of employees. Suffice it to say, the more users you have on your network, the more it's going to cost your organization. Today, it may cost you thousands of dollars annually in lost productivity. But if Jupiter Media Metrix's prediction is correct (see graph), the amount of spam users receive will more than double from 2002 to 2006--as will the cost to your company.

Without anti-spam software or an outsourced e-mail service that filters spam, employees have to view and delete every message delivered. Unwanted messages take up network bandwidth and server disk space. Some of the racier spam messages may tempt employees to view material that conflicts with your organization's appropriate use policy, which could lead to legal trouble if an offended employee takes action. In fact, spam raises many legal issues. But legal issues aside, any message a user opens may end up diverting him for several minutes.

A less common but still possible problem is an e-mail denial-of-service attack, where a malicious spammer floods your mail server with so many messages that it crashes. If you don't want to find just how much your company relies on e-mail by watching your servers go down, you have to take such a threat seriously.

A widely cited Jupiter Media Metrix report says users this year can expect on average fewer than two pieces of unsolicited spam every day this year, but more than two additional messages generated from opt-in lists. For many users, those estimates are low by a factor of two or three. Users who post messages and include their e-mail addresses on Internet sites or on Usenet are especially susceptible to having their addresses harvested.

Once your employees' e-mail addresses are out there, there's no way to stop the insanity, but there are a number of tools you can use to fight back. There are many downloadable applications designed to rid individual users of spam, but IT departments need something more. That's why we put together a list of enterprise anti-spam products.

If all else fails, you can take spammers to court. Internet activist Bennett Haselton won $2,000 from spammers who violated his state's commercial electronic mail law.

All of these avenues require some level of expenditure, but the payoff should be worth it--an in-box free of herbal Viagra, hot teens, and get-rich-quick schemes.

Source: ZDNet