Just recently, MailGuard received an email from someone frustrated by spam. Needless to say we signed them up to our email filtering service and helped them to get rid of spam. However, because their account is not unusual, we thought we'd share it via the blog.
Image by Zach Klein under a CC BY 2.0 license.
(Email published with permission from the author...)
An article written by the Age on October 16th stated how spam complaints soared by 622% in the past year. I’ve never called in an official complaint to the Australian Communications and Media Authority, but I understand people’s frustration with spam.
Every morning when I open my work Outlook, I know there will be spam in my inbox. It’s always the same three or four emails about the same topics. And despite my best efforts to prevent spam, I still receive the same spam every day.
The issue I have with spam is loss of productivity, particularly, the time wasted on checking, deleting and setting controls to prevent spam. When I receive spam, I take time away from work to add the email onto a blocked list or make a rule to move it to the junk mail folder thinking this will prevent future spam. Unfortunately, this doesn’t always work.
Loss productivity is not just about the time associated with checking and deleting spam. When the Outlook alert comes up, it breaks my train of thought. Then I check the new email only to find out it is just spam. Not only have I lost focus on my current task, but I also need to refocus on the task.
--Editor's note: read email is addictive as a slot machine--
If I count my time spent on spam – about five minutes in the morning, maybe two minutes three times a day, and the time it takes me to refocus on my work – it adds up. Over a year period and if I multiply this by the number of employees in my organisation, it works out to a lot of time wasted on spam and a lot of lost productivity.
Can you help my company MailGuard?
XXXXX
Statistics demonstrate how this kind of story is not uncommon and illustrate why spam continues to be an issue for email users:
- According to a leading security provider, spam made up 85% of global email volume in September 2012.
- Despite using traditional spam filters, roughly 19% of corporate email received is still spam (figures according to the Radicati Group).
- In a survey conducted by MailGuard and the University of Melbourne, 97.7% of respondents indicated that they have been affected by spam email. Of those, 57.8% dealt with spam on a daily basis, while a further 28.5% dealt with spam hourly.
- The Internet Crime Complaint Centre (ICCC ) released a report showing the cost of spam is rising. In 2011, the cost of spam, which can include money lost to scams and money spent on preventing spam, rose to $485.3 million in the US.
You don't have to be frustrated. You too can get rid of spam.
