On April 2 Nucleus Research, Inc. released a study, “Spam: The Repeat Offender” which reports that, according to a survey of 849 email users, 90% of all email going into company networks is spam, and 66% of spam gets through corporate filters.
Other findings include:
* 86% of spam is adult-oriented solicitations
* 80% of spam is financial lending solicitations
* 76% of spam is retail offers
* Users spend an average of 4.5 minutes per week reviewing messages in their junk email files
* Users spend an average of 7.3 minutes per weeks searching for legitimate messages that were deleted by corporate email filters
* 18% of respondents want spammers should to do jail time; 1/3 of them think jail time should be more than 36 months.
* Over 50% of e-mail users believe convicted spammers should be fined at least $1 for each spam message distributed.
* U.S. businesses lose $70 billion annually in the time it takes for employees to read and deal with spam
* U.S. employees on average each receive 21 spam messages in their email inboxes each day; down from 29 daily in 2004
* Companies that quarantine spam costs $113 per user; companies that delete spam messages without user review costs $183 per user.
849 email users is certainly not a statistically representative number of the entire population, but the data is useful to demonstrate the ongoing problem with spam and how it impacts business.
I recently wrote about how image spam impacts business.
The statistic I found most interesting is that having a policy to delete spam without review costs businesses more than quarantining the spam. Perhaps this shows that most spam that is quarantined never gets reviewed by the intended recipients, thus saving significant time over having the recipients deleting the spam messages themselves.
Tags: awareness and training, e-mail, email, Information Security, IT compliance, nucleus research, policies and procedures, privacy, regulatory compliance, risk management, spam