Spam costs a lot: to us regular users. A nice article about the cost we have to pay in order to defend against spam.

The cost vectors (according to the article):

– antispam technology

Most companies deploy additional servers to filter spam. Some also buy commercial software to perform spam filtering. It needs staff to manage it, and all of these costs money.

– lost productivity

Spam wastes your time. It needs some attention to handle it. Note that “deleting messages, however, turns out to be the most expensive spam strategy. The average employee at companies that delete spam messages loses an average of 7.3 minutes per week looking for lost legitimate messages.”

– wasted storage

A usual method is to move spam emails to a quarantine. It consumes disk space, so you need additional storage capacity, and enterprise grade storage still costs.

– intangible costs

“Spam has a broader economic impact as well, hitting many businesses and nations that are least able to bear the burden. Consider Nigeria, for example. Nucleus Research noted that while fraud and corruption have been rampant in Nigeria for some time, the country may be forever kept in the digital darkness because of the volume of deceptive email sent by local spammers. The research firm noted that most spam filters block any mail with “Nigeria” in the title or text, effectively keeping anyone communicating with, from, to or about Nigeria from doing it via email.”