It would be interesting to know how many e-mails, on average, someone at work receives.
I have no idea whether I’m average or not but I get around 25-30 business-related emails per day. The spam might total up to 100 or so. I’ve accidentally deleted several important emails while cleaning my inbox of this crap, another hidden cost of spam.
Regards
Testy
So given that each spam takes about 4 seconds to deal with, on average, according to the article, it takes-- wait, no, I’ll be very liberal-- 10 minutes to deal with spam a day?
Wouldn’t a big business kill to have only 10 wasted minutes of productivity per employee per day?
And now you’re being intentionally obtuse.
This isn’t 10 minutes of screwing off, which every employee is going to do. Probably a lot more than that. I know it’s necessary for me to have some distractions (of my choosing) while I’m working. Even if I’m on a strict deadline and I’ve got all sorts of shit breathing down my neck, I’ll still have a window opened to the SDMB, or something else totally unrelated to work.
This is totally different. This is like someone coming in and forcing your employees to listen to a 10 minute lecture. In that time, they’re not allowed to do anything else. Also, any phone calls received during that time go straight to a disconnect (to simulate good emails being deleted).
Oh, and the lecture is on miracle penis enlargement pills.
All of this is just the employee at the desk with the PC. That’s not counting the wasted bandwidth, ISP costs, and all the rest.
-Joe
No. Far be it for me to ever support any spammer, but I DO support being accurate in judging just how much monetary damage is caused by those spammers.
So, 10 minutes of screwing off would be a better waste of company time than 10 minutes of deleting spam mail? I’d say that in any business, 10 minutes of wasted time is 10 minutes of wasted time. And that it would be easier to defend those 10 minutes by saying you were deleting spam than by saying you were busy reading a message board.
Once again, I am not arguing the physical costs. Bandwidth, storage, all that. It does cost money.
I’m saying that any other use of 10 minutes wouldn’t be so readily attacked. Case in point, it’s ok to surf the boards, but not to delete annoying e-mail.
Here is a relatively recent attempt at quantifying spam in the workplace.
As a internet drones (no pun intended), my and Binarydrone’s experiences with spam may be more appropriately counted in the suppor/infrastruction costs, but where do you draw the line? Dependancy on e-mail varies widely from company to company, industry to industry.
I’m wondering if that guy mispoke or was misquoted. He probably meant to say that the hour and a half would be spent deleting spam, not being upset over it. That’s the impression I got when reading that.
That’s a good question, but the way I read it was “then there are people who get a spam message and see that as an opportunity to spend most of the day complaining about spam”. I dunno, the article isn’t clear.
Good link, though, to the InfoWorld report. But I’m curious about some parts of it:
I’d wager that companies lose a lot more than 1.4 percent of each employee’s productivity on other things – ESPN.com, SDMB, personal e-mails, personal phone calls… all that. Things that they would be better equipped to handle. If they’re really worried about productivity, then their first step shouldn’t be dealing with spam, IMO. There are easier targets.
This is about 30 seconds per spam, a far cry from the 4 seconds touted by the other report. Even so, 6.5 minutes in the work day is virtually nothing. What consumes more productivity time – posting to the SDMB, or spending 6.5 minutes on spam?
Sure, spam may be more annoying, but it has a lowery productivity cost.
This really has nothing to do with work spam, but I’d say this is a far deal for free e-mail users (Yahoo!, Hotmail, etc.) Certainly, company e-mail has a specific purpose and is paid for by the company, but this is akin to dealing with 40 minutes of TV commercials per week. As a Yahoo! user, I see it pretty much as dealing with ads, just on the net. Again, this is not related to my discussion of lost productivity in the workplace.
So the wasted productivity goes from 6.5 minutes to 4.81 minutes. So 1.69 minutes are not significant. Where does one draw the line?
It appears that you’re assuming that spam-deletion time time comes from a common “time-wasting” pool, which is not necessarily the case. I’d argue that “wasteful” activities such as water-cooler chat or surfing the SDMB are fundamentally different from spending time deleting spam–one offers a beneficial mental break, while the other is just annoying busywork.
Let’s say (I’m picking figures to make the math easy) that I work for a large company (20k employees), and I’m pretty well paid but not overly so for, say, the software industry (my time is worth fifty cents a minute–i.e., about 60k a year). So if I spend ten minutes a day deleting spam, that’s five bucks’ worth of time. If half my colleagues do the same, that’s fifty thousand dollars per day–which adds up to a million dollars a month–in lost productivity just for my company. Cutting that in half still leaves you with $500k per month for that company alone.
[QUOTE=Hunter Hawk]
It appears that you’re assuming that spam-deletion time time comes from a common “time-wasting” pool, which is not necessarily the case. I’d argue that “wasteful” activities such as water-cooler chat or surfing the SDMB are fundamentally different from spending time deleting spam–one offers a beneficial mental break, while the other is just annoying busywork.[/.QUOTE]
You would, yes, but would your boss? Which would be a more justifiable use of your time, to your boss (since he ultimately gets to decide if you’re wasting company time or not) – spending 10 minutes sifting through your e-mail, or spending 10 minutes on the SDMB?
Again, this is fine for you – but to the higher ups who get to decide what you can waste your time on, I’m sure a lot more productivity money is wasted in what they would deem to be “wastes of time” – that is, talking on the phone to your aunt, posting here, checking out who won the game last night, etc.
If those weren’t big “wastes of time” to the executives, then I doubt so much money would go into researching ways to stop them (proxy servers, etc.)
I’m going to stick with my interpretation, as the literal reading of it is far too absurd. But I gotta say, I love the mental image of a company brought to its knees because all the employees are sitting around all bummed out – because they read one too many mortgage ads that day. TFF.
There are far more absurd things in life. 
caphis, I guess that I don’t get what you are saying. Are you saying that Spam, in fact, does not cause productivity loss? Do you just not agree with the figures that are posted for how much loss it causes? What? Does the time that I spend deleting Spam or sorting through it to determine if it is Spam or a customer that need help not count as productivity loss?
More to the point, say that there is no hard productivity loss that we can attach to Spam’s impact. Can we agree that:
(a)It exists.
(b)It is probably higher that we think.
©We need to try to put an end to it.
I’m saying that there are easier targets for corporations to go after for causing loss of productivity. And I’m saying that, unless those targets are also being actively pursued, the cost suggested for “loss of productivity” due to spam are outrageous. It is much easier for a business to justify handling spam than it is to justify wasting corporate time surfing the net.
I agree.
I disagree. I honestly don’t think that most employees checks their e-mails one at a time as they come in, but rather in one fell swoop every so often during the day. For example, in an inbox that has:
It would take me less than a second to press DELETE, DELETE, DELETE, down down, DELETE and then another 5 seconds to assess if the remaining two are spam or not. And according to the article, on average, that’s about 1/3 of my daily spam income.
Add to that the fact that a lot of companies only have intra-office e-mail systems, and I think the problem is LOWER than we think. Consider-- if someone asks you “about how much time per day do you spend dealing with junkmail?,” your brain first thinks “far too much!” and then decides to settle on what you think is a good answer – 10 minutes.
We do, but there are better ways to focus on ending productivity wastes.
An important distinction to make is that the good folks providing us the distraction of the SDMB are doing so in a solicited and legal manner.
Spammers break the law and are uninvited.
Bringing the conversation back to the legislative/law enforcement aspect of the OP, if we can streamline the legal process of matching appropriate consequences to the appropriate spammer, we can make spamming a less lucrative venture.
Another thing to point out is that spamming, hacking and fraud are all bedfellows…bedfellows at the kama sutra manage a trois level. No one (smart) spams from an account or connection that can be traced anywhere near them.
So even if you’re not comfortable with the concept that spammers are trespassing on the networks that swallow their mail, if a spammer goes down, chances are that a defrauding hacker is going down as well.
I would agree with your ten-minute estimate. On the other hand, it does cost for the infrastructure required, bandwidth and storage space mostly. I think Honeydewgrrl got it right with her comment about spam being uninvited. Spam isn’t something I go crazy about but it is annoying.
Another aspect to consider is the people who lose money buying/investing in the things advertised. I have seen very few companies I’d consider reputable advertising via spam. Most seem to be very “iffy” companies selling equally “iffy” products.
Regards
Testy
I think this is not universally true. Certainly I’ll check mail as soon as it arrives in case it needs immediate attention (e.g. someone needs access to some code or has a bug). There have been quite a few studies on the effect of distraction on workers – it may take longer than you think to return to the same level of productivity, particularly if you were “in the zone” when the mail arrived.
You can not assume that everyone reads email through a fast cheap connection. Lots of people read email on their cell phones or personal organizers. What’s the additional cost and time of Spam when read under those modalities?
Your main point seems to be that the distraction of Spam is so small that it gets lost in the noise. Given that the Spam is universally unwanted, particularly in the corporate environment, why should employers tolerate it at all? Just because workers don’t spend 100% of their time being productive does not mean that employers welcome an additional drain. This argument boils down to “It’s OK to inconvenience and annoy people if you only do it a little bit.”
The argument is even weaker when you consider that most Spam (at least the stuff I see) is aimed at individuals and concerns obtaining drugs, nostrums, mortgages, or porn – none of which are suitable subjects for office correspondence. So the Spammers are actively soliciting people to make potentially illegal personal purchases on company time over company equipment.
And while this discussion has gravitated towards the financial cost of Spam, the irritation value should not be neglected. I do not really need to be reminded on a regular basis that Teen Sluts are Waiting to <fill in the blank> on <random body parts> of <persons or animals of various genders and hues>.
This is where you loose me. I think that there are several nuances that you are missing. First, all of the other targets for lost productivity that you have mentioned (chatting by the water cooler, posting on the SDMB employees goofing off etc.) are things that the powers that be have control over. At any moment, my boss could walk in and say “hey, you are spending too much time surfing” or whatever. They can set policies that effect when I get breaks, how long I spend on those breaks, acceptable web use and on and on. Moreover, many of these things that you mention now enjoy a social accommodation that has been reached between labor and management.
Spam, on the other hand, is a source of productivity loss (and an escalating one at that) for which no policy may be set. My boss can’t write a memo one day stating that Spam is no longer allowed. See what I mean.
From the article linked in the OP:
I really, really hope they do this by submitting 85,000 identical motions every day.
kung fu lola:
Are you for real? These folks are performing the equivalent of demolishing the National Forest and using it for sewage. There used to be this incredibly cool thing called “email” which ran on “internet” – anyone in the world could get in touch with me simply by sending a message to my address, and they could include file attachments, etc.
These asshole bastards have practically killed that. It is no longer true that if you want to get in touch with me, you need merely send me an email. Because it’s going straight into the trash, unseen and unread, if:
• It isn’t addressed to me on the To or the Cc line. Forget about Bcc’ing me anything.
• It contains any html formatting.
• It contains any mention, in subject or body, of any of a large library of words and phrases and character symbols, either alone or in combination with each other
My very aggressive spam filters exist because I get 700, 850, 1225 pieces of spam every fucking day and I’d rather just toss the likely spam out than wade through the sewage to make sure there are no gemstones lurking within it.
And now we’ve got people suggesting, apparently in all seriousness, that we charge money to send email as a response to spam and the burden it places on our collective bandwidth.
Damn right it should be a felony. They should sentence them to lifetime Intensive Supervision Probation (ISP), monitoring their activities throughout the day, and tossing them back in prison any time they even so much as attempt to sit down in the general vicinity of a computer.
(I think that’s reasonable and mature on my part. The gut reaction is more along the lines of “capital offense! capital offense!”)