That puts the cost of spam to the US economy at a staggering US$70 billion.
IT market researchers Nucleus Research and KnowledgeStorm say users spend a little over one per cent of their time every day dealing with the spam in their inboxes.
A market survey of 850 workers carried out by the companies found users averaged 21 spam messages per day, and that two out of three email messages were spam, despite 60 per cent of companies having already deployed enterprise-wide filters.
Nucleus says its study is the most comprehensive research ever conducted on Spam. And despite the large numbers of spam messages getting through corporate filtering systems, it found the situation is better than it was three years ago.
In calculating the lost productivity of spam in 2004, Nucleus found the average user lost 3.1 per cent of their time to spam – that number has now reduced to 1.2 per cent of time.
The number of spam messages has fallen from 29 to 21, and enterprise spam policies like auto delete and quarantining has meant the average amount of time a user spends on each spam message has reduced from 30 seconds to 16 seconds since 2004.
“We calculated the cost of spam to corporations based on an average fully loaded cost of $30 per hour with a 2080-hour year. This brings the annual cost of spam to $712 per user per year, down from $1,934 in 2004,” the report found.
The research also attempted a rough guess at how annoying spam is for users.
And it found that users pretty annoyed … 18 per cent of those surveyed said spammers should be sent to jail, with a third of those saying the sentences should be three years or longer.
For more Business Software news, click here.
