How Much is Spam Costing You?

As part of a marketing campaign for Google Message Security, the service based on the acquisition of Postini last year, Google have created an intriguing little tool to calculate how much spam is actually costing your company.

To calculate this, you’ll need to enter things like; i) number of employees with email, ii) number of workdays per year per employee, iii) average hourly salary per employee, iv) average number of spam messages per day per employee, v) number of seconds wasted with each spam message.
Google then produces a figure based on how many days (and dollars) in lost productivity this represents. Naturally, it also shows you how long it would take for Google’s service to pay for itself…the main motivation behind the tool.

The results are an average and the of course costs vary according to the size of your workforce. Also, some people are more susceptible to spam than others and therefore take longer to detect spam than other people do.

Adam Dawes, a Google product manager said “We know in these tougher economic times that companies are trying to figure out how they can save”.

Google itself need to strike down harder on spammers using Gmail accounts to spam from. Richard Cox, chief information office with the Spamhaus antispam group explains “If you could see how many anonymous Gmail drop boxes are being used as the registration addresses for domains that are being used in spam, you’d understand just how much this is costing the community,”