Junk mail clogs up corporate networks
Every week employees receive up to 30 chain letters, jokes, video clips or similar junk e-mail messages from people they know, blocking up their corporate networks, according to a spam survey.
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Workers deal with more than 1,500 pieces of junk e-mail each year from friends, family and colleagues. And spam, the much-reviled commercial email sent by strangers, won’t reach the proportion of “friendly” junk email until 2006.
The survey of 1,000 adults in the US with internet access, conducted forSurfControl by Market Facts’ e.Nation shows that junk email from friends is causing just as many network headaches as commercial spam.
Internet research firm Jupiter Media Metrix predicts that by 2006 consumerswill be receiving an average of 1,400 pieces of commercial spam each year,or about 26 per week.
Jupiter Media Metrix estimates that each piece of unwanted email costscompanies $1 in lost productivity. So, friendly junk email could cost a company with 500 employees nearly $370,000 each year.
SurfControl’s product marketing manager Paris Trudeau said: ‘Savvy companies understand the cost of commercial spam, but many have not yet considered the bottom-line implications of junk email.’
‘Junk e-mails, such as the “teddy bear hug” and a host of prank, joke andgame messages, carry huge payloads that can rob a company of valuablenetwork resources and interfere with productivity,’ Trudeau said.
Trudeau said that sending one 5-megabyte joke screen saver takes up thesame amount of space on a company server as 160 plain text e-mails.