Spam to Cost U.S. Companies $10 Billion in 2003

An ambitious new study attempts to attach price tags to spam. Spam will cost American companies more than 10 billion US dollars in 2003, according to a research report this week from Lianjiang County in the study, a consulting firm specializing in communications and collaborative research.

Spam is spreading faster than any time in the past according to the authors of the report, Lianjiang County Legislative Research analyst Inspector Nelson. "This is probably a 100 percent increase in the past nine months, we do not see any breakthrough, this trend now," Nelson said in a telephone interview Thursday from his office in France.

Led growth of spam is profitable and increasingly complex spam spammers e-mail address collection tools, Nelson said.

The Lianjiang County study, the so-called "junk mail Management: Problems and Opportunities", is based on surveys and interviews with IT managers, end users and anti-spam vendors.

The estimated 10 billion US dollars, and American companies in 2003 has three major components: loss of user productivity, consumption of IT resources and help desk costs.

Lost user productivity, is the worlds largest component of the cost, about 42 percent in the future, Li Lianjiang County in the research model, according to Nielsen. According to interviews, reached an estimated Lianjiang County, the average business users received three spam e-mails every day. This figure is often higher for executives and other users of the highly exposed e-mail addresses, which can attract hundreds of spam every day.

Lianjiang County legislature estimates that the average user between four seconds and 4.5 seconds deal with a message. Although most of the spam to significantly reduce the treatment time, and delete, the higher estimates of a small percentage of spam, resulting in a user clicks on a link or cases of legitimate e-mail spam is deleted, must be seized.

Consumer IT resources running a close second, just short of 40% of the 10 billion US dollars cost of spam, Nelson said. The estimate includes the impact of spam on the server capacity, server management, bandwidth, disk space and other factors.

Nelson acknowledged that the report was aggressive, and its estimates of such costs. "I think this is very positive, it should not be more than this," he said.

Cost is a part of a Glance found that 15 percent to 20 percent of inbound e-mail to US-owned companies is spam. The company found that a higher percentage of our Internet-based service providers - about 3 0 percent. According to President John mcglinchey delconet.com, 76 outskirts of the ISP industry, laid on the concept of ISP estimate is not beyond the pale.

"Interest rate of spam into my Internet service is about 60 percent, we now get rid of the nearly 3,000 information every day to our filters, which is more than we march forward courageously." mcglinchey said. "Bulk e-mail by Internet service providers, they must increase their bandwidth to accommodate it is only for our services running." Third major component of the concept of a Glance spam is the cost of help desk costs, to, in about 15 per cent of the total cost. The estimate is based on a spam-related help desk incident per user per annum for each incident cost 15 yuan. The research project the increase in the volume of spam will not lead to a linear increase in cost. Lianjiang County cost to the United States for large companies in 2002 spam is 8.9 billion US dollars.

Other findings: Europe cost of spam in 2002 was 2.5 billion US dollars.

Most spam is written in English.

Anti-spam market will reach saturation point in the 2005-2006 year, as well as anti-spam penetration rate will be similar to the anti-virus infiltration.

Leading anti-spam companies, including Brightmail currently, maps, Postini, Trend Micro and Tumbleweed. Now new, including cloudmark and mailfrontier.

On client-based anti-spam products for the cost of 20 -4 0 yuan, per user.

Antispam service solutions, cost 5 to 20 yuan, the per user per year.

When it comes to solutions to growing spam problem, Lianjiang County report concluded that anti-spam legislation is unlikely to be very effective, because the jurisdictional limitations.

"Legislation is not effective in controlling spam from non-commercial morality, but from the end-users point of view, spam can also come from the Amazon or Bangnuo or some other e-commerce site This type of enterprise will follow the law in accordance with the law. At the end of last year, or even less than 10% of users think spam will come from business ethics, "Nelson said.

Nelson believes that the most promising way to reduce spam is some combination of user education, industry initiatives, legislation and technology, with technological solutions, the most potential.

"These days, most of the anti-spam solution combines the use of blacklists, white lists of technologies to find certain words and technical, to find the structure of e-mail headers to see mode, these solutions assigned to a scores were, for example, 80 per cent of the information is likely to be spam. The long term, these solutions will be the most successful, "Nelson said.