Here are the latest numbers released from the nice folks at Ferris Research on the projected cost of spam in 2009: $130,000,000,000.00 USD
Cough Cough… gasp, What??! (correct, that’s 130 billion… I thought I’d add the zeros in there for some added affect)
This is a 30% increase from 2007. Scary stuff! but still, I think a pretty conservative estimate. It was calculated from operational costs and productivity loss from people inspecting/deleting spam and also from searching/retrieving legitimate email (false positives) deleted in error by spam filters. It seems a little hard to believe seeing all that has been done in the last 4 years to combat spam, but I guess it’s time to step it up.
Here are some more interesting statistics:
• # non-spam emails sent during 2006 by business email users: 6 trillion
• Estimated number of non-spam email messages sent worldwide each day 2006: 25 billion
• % of email messages sent daily that are spam messages: > 75%
• Typical # Internet emails sent and received by a business user: 600 per week
• Cost of a user deleting a spam message: $0.04
• Cost of a user retrieving a bona fide message erroneously deleted as spam (“false positive”): $3.50
This last one through me… no spam filter is perfect, there will always be legitimate mail that gets blocked, but I would be interested in knowing what percentage of this 130 bil is spent looking for false positives? Ferris, please don’t make us wait another 4 years. Keep up the good work!
Read the whole summary from Ferris Research
Bye for now,
Kevin
