How Much are Spam and Viruses
Costing you?

Free email costs more than you think!

It doesn't look expensive - but it is!

I remember when free email used to actually be free. You'd send a message and in a few minutes it would arrive. That was the good old days. In a lot of ways it is still the same today - in that your message still arrives. but it is often buried in tons of junk email known as SPAM!

If you have no spam filter then for every one message you get you have to go through and delete 20 junk messages. And it take time to delete this junk email - a lot of time. And this is time that you and your employees could otherwise be doing something useful. You just sit there - angry - hitting the delete key over and over again - looking at ads from people who want to help you get rich quick - enlarge things - sell you porn - Rolex watches - credit cards - mortgages - web cams - and pills, pills, pills!

So - lets talk about numbers here. What does this cost? Let's figure it out.

Let's suppose that an employee costs $18.00 an hour to hire. That's really a $12/hour employee but with matching social security and benefits and other overhead you need to add 50% to get the real cost. Lets assume that it take 10 seconds on the average to delete a spam. Not that every spam takes 10 seconds - but sometimes computers get a little slow and in many cases you do have to read some of the message to figure out it's spam. So - at 6 spams a minute a person can delete 360 spams and hour.

6 spams/minute - 6 x 60 = 360 spams per hour
A cost of $18/hour means it cost $18 to delete 360 spams
360 / 18 = 20 spams cost one dollar

But since only one email in 20 is a real message - what that means is that every good email costs $1.00 because of spam. What does this add up to? That depends on how many employees you have and how much spam they get. But let's go at this a different way this time to keep it really simple. Let's suppose that we have a small law firm with 30 employees. 20 employees are support staff and they cost $18/hour. The other 10 are lawyers and other high paid professionals and they cost $80/hour. Lets assume that this firm has been around a while and they get a lot of email. And suppose they spend 30 minutes a day deleting spam.

So - here's how it breaks down:

(20 x 18 x 0.5) + (10 x 80 x 0.5) = $480 per day
480 x 30 = $14,400 per month
14,400 x 12 = $172,800 per year

As you can see - this is really expensive! But are my number right? Well - suppose I'm off by a factor of four. That's still $43,200 a year for 30 employees and that's still a lot of money. Can you imagine what this would cost a company that had 30,000 employees rather than just 30? The numbers quickly run into the billions.

You might argue here that people don't work on weekends and that there aren't 30 days in a month. But the spam never stops - 24 hours a day - 7 days a week - 365.25 days a year. When you go to work on Monday - you have to spend the extra time deleting all the junk email that came in over the weekend - and that take real time.

And - I haven't even touched the cost of getting and getting rid of viruses. The down time - the data loss - and the shear agony of dealing with the problem. If you or your company has ever been hit - you know what I'm talking about. And if you haven't been hit - you are either really lucky or you have taken a lot of time and effort to make sure you don't.

Good spam blocking and virus blocking solves these problems. And I'm talking about spam and virus filtering that really work. Where you don't lose any email and very little spam and no viruses get through. The front end server removes the offender from your email allowing you to get only the email you want and freeing you up to do useful work or have more free time.

And speaking of time - time is probably one of our most precious assets. It's not just the money - it's the time. What does 30 minutes a day saved really mean? 30 minutes a day is 15 hours a month. That's 180 hours a year. That's 22.5 business days. You could install a spam filter and giver your employees an extra one month paid vacation and be ahead of where you are now.

The Cost of Spam Filtering

Filtering spam is far less expensive than not filtering it. In the above examples I assumed that it costs $1.00 to delete 20 spams. And - if you get 20 spams for each good email that means that each good email without spam filtering costs $1.00. With spam filtering you only pay 1/2 cent for each good email and recover $1.00 in saved time. That makes spam filtering 200 times less expensive than not having spam filtering.