If the CEO wants to know how to save some money from being wasted each day, tell her the best people she can pressure aren’t the employees, but the company’s federal Congressmen.
Forget about gathering all the staff in one room and telling them how they are money-sucking time wasters. The problem may not be their fault. Spam could be to blame.
The Royal Pingdom blog takes the higher estimate of spam appearing in inboxes – the 94 percent figure cited by Postini – in determining how much spam may be costing employers:
According to the U.S. Department of Labor, the average hourly salary is $18.21. Based on that, one minute of a worker’s time is worth just over $0.30. This means that for every minute lost for those 86 million workers, $26.1 million goes down the drain. In one year, 260 work days, that amounts to almost $6.8 billion.
However, just one lost minute per day on average is not realistic. Let us assume that the average lost time at work due to spam is five minutes per day. This gives us $130.5 million per day, or $33.9 billion per year.
A lot of management of the spam problem can be done at the gateway of a network. Plenty of companies are out there who will take a firm’s money to help with this.
But that’s a mitigating workaround, not a true solution. If we are going to see a cleanup in spam, we need the US Government to put significant pressure on the countries where a lot of the spammers and bot-herders reside.
These are criminal rings operating in sophisticated ways, not just a couple of guys throwing stuff into a bunch of Usenet groups.
Spam may not be a completely solvable problem, since the financial incentive to spam will exist as long as people are dumb enough to buy and invest based on something that lands in the inbox. But there’s no reason the bigger operations can’t be greeted in the early morning hours by gun-toting authorities wielding arrest warrants.
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