Spam how much of a problem?

"Spam accounts for 45% of all e-mails, or 15 billion messages every day, and costs business world-wide a total of £10 billion a year in lost productivity and technology expenses, according to the Radicati Group, a market research firm in Palo Alto, CA. The firm predicts the number of daily spams will rise to more than 50 billion by 2007, and costs will reach almost $200 billion per year."

--Wall Street Journal, August 2003

London, UK, June 1st 2007 - Spam levels remained relatively unchanged during May, with 88.51% of all email scanned by a leading Anti Spam solution provider were classified as spam.

"Some people are predicting that spam levels will drop with the arrest of the so called ‘Spam King' this week. However, I always think it's a mistake to underestimate a spammer, it's a sure fire way of finding yourself ambushed. Every business has a contingency plan and there is no reason to suspect that spammers are any different," says Diego d'Ambra, CTO of SoftScan. "Although it has been relatively quiet on the spam front for the past eight weeks, a sudden spike that caused a 25% increase at the beginning of the week has shown that the spammers are still out there and mean business."

How is spam affecting your company? How much is spam costing your company?

Using a conservative approach, let's take a look at how much spam is estimated to cost a company of 50 people.

If we make the assumption that each person receives on average 20 spam emails per day and spends on average 15 seconds processing each email, then that means the company receives about 365 thousand spam emails over the course of a year and that its employees spend about 1525 hours processing these spam emails by either deleting them or responding to them. That's 1525 hours of lost productivity.

To quantify this lost productivity, let's assume that the salary per person averages out to be £20,000. This translates to a productivity loss of over £11,000 in a year.

So, just looking at employee productivity, spam is costing this company of 50 employees over £11,000 a year. If you further calculate in technology expenses associated with spam, such as the amount of time wasted by the email servers in processing all the spam emails and the amount of time IT support staff spends battling spam, you'll find that the cost of spam only goes up.

Yarm Computers specialises in combating Spam with tried and tested techniques and solutions to significantly reduce the amount of Spam infiltrating your network.

In 2002 Yarm Computers in response to client demand began looking at robust Anti-Spam solutions. After much research Barracuda Networks were chosen as our preferred supplier even though it meant importing the units from the west coast of the USA (Barracuda had no European office at that time). Our partnership has gone from strength to strength, Barracuda now have a UK office which has further improved the levels of service we can deliver. Our smallest Barracuda installation to date is a 5 user network our largest being over 2000 users. At all times the Barracuda unit have provided an instant solution to clients with spam problems.

The Barracuda Spam Firewall is an integrated hardware and software solution for complete protection of your email server. It provides a powerful, easy to use, and affordable solution to eliminating spam and viruses from your organization by providing the following protection:

· Denial of Service and Security Protection

· Rate Control

· IP Reputation Analysis

· Sender Authentication

· Recipient Verification

· Virus Check

· Policy (User-specified rules)

· Spam Fingerprint Check

· Intent Analysis

· Image Analysis

· Bayesian Analysis

· Rule-based Scoring